Dead and Alive

opened a door, stepped across the threshold, and found the hallway deserted.
    The cry came again, twice in quick succession. Louder here than in the laboratory, the sound was still distant.
    Sometimes Deucalion dreamed of an old stone house with interior walls of cracked and yellowed plaster, illuminated by oil lamps and candle sconces. When the worst storm winds blew, from the attic arose a disturbing click-and-clatter, like the fleshless body of Death rattling in his cowled robe as he walked the night. Worse than what might wait above was what might wait below: A narrow turning of stone stairs descended to an ironbound door, and beyond the door were the rooms of a forbidding cellar, where the stagnant air sometimes had the acrid taste of spoiled suet and at other times the salty taste of tears.
    Here in the old hospital, the latest two shrieks had come from another floor, whether from above or below, he could not tell. He walked to the stairs at the end of the corridor, opened the fire door, and waited, feeling almost as if he might be dreaming that well-known scenario but in a new setting.
    In the familiar nightmare, the horror of going into the attic or the desire not to go into the cellar was always the sum of the plot, an endless wretched journey through the rooms that lay between those two poles ofterror, as he strove to avoid both the highest and lowest chambers of the house.
    Now, the shriek fell through the hospital stairwell from above. Heard more clearly than before, it was pleading and mournful.
    Like the miserable cries that sometimes haunted his infrequent sleep.
    Deucalion ascended the stairs toward the higher realms of Mercy.
    In the old stone house, which might have once been a real place or just a structure of his imagination, he had dreamed his way into the cellar many times, but never farther than the first room. Then he always woke, choking with a nameless dread.
    Twice, with an oil lamp, he had gone into the dream-house attic. Both times, a fierce storm raged outside. Drafts blustered through that high room, and he was shocked out of sleep and into anguish by what the lamplight revealed.
    Climbing the hospital stairs, Deucalion felt at risk of losing his balance, and he put one hand on the railing.
    He was constructed from the parts of bodies salvaged from a prison graveyard. His hands were big and strong. They had been the hands of a strangler.
    One floor above Victor’s main lab, as Deucalion reached for the door to the corridor, he heard the shriek again, its source still overhead. As he continued up the stairs, he watched his powerful hand slide along the railing.
    His eyes had been salvaged from an ax murderer.
    He sensed that what he was about to see in the higher halls of Mercy would be no less terrible than what the lamplight had shown him in the dream-house attic. On this fateful night, past and present were coming together like the hemispheres of a nuclear warhead, and the post-blast future was unknown.

CHAPTER 29
    THE TORMENT OF PERPETUAL AWARENESS. The torment of cold. The torment of the transparent polymeric fabric. The torment of the glass door on the freezer.
    Drifting in the saline solution, Chameleon can see the large room in which it is stored. A blue scene. The blue of cold vision.
    Out there in the laboratory, work continues. Busy blue people.
    Perhaps they are TARGETS. Perhaps they are EXEMPTS .
    When not in cold suspension, Chameleon can smell the difference between TARGETS and EXEMPTS .
    The scent of any EXEMPT pleases Chameleon. The scent of any TARGET infuriates.
    In its current condition, it can smell nothing.
    The walls of the freezer conduct the unit’s compressor-motor vibrations to the imprisoning sack. The sack conducts them into the solution.
    This is neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant sensation for Chameleon.
    Now the character of the vibrations changes. They are similar but subtly different.
    This happens periodically. Chameleon is sufficiently intelligent to consider the phenomenon and to reach conclusions about it.
    Evidently, the freezer has two motors. They alternate to prevent either from being overtaxed.
    This also ensures that if one motor fails, the other will serve as backup.
    Chameleon’s physical function is greatly inhibited by the cold. Its mental function is less affected.
    With little to occupy its mind, Chameleon focuses obsessively on every minim of sensory input, such as motor vibrations.
    It is not at risk of being driven insane by its