Dead and Alive

him.
    From the lab, he would contact Nick Frigg, the Gamma who was the superintendent at Crosswoods Waste Management, the landfill in the uplands northeast of Lake Pontchartrain. Thoroughly strangled, Erika Four had been sent there for disposal; therefore, Nick would be the one most likely to know in which sector of which pit, under what garbage, she had been buried.
    Watching himself in a full-length mirror, Victor kicked off his slippers. With the flair of a fine matador manipulating a cape, he stripped out of the sapphire silk robe.
    He picked up the .45 pistol and posed with it this way and that, pleased with the impression that he made.
    Now what to wear, what to wear … ?

CHAPTER 31
    THE HANDS OF A STRANGLER. The gray eyes of an executed ax murderer. Of his two hearts, one had come from a mad arsonist who burned down churches, the other from a child molester.
    As he reached the stairwell landing, a floor and a half above the main laboratory at the Hands of Mercy, his vision brightened for a moment, returned to normal, brightened….
    If he had stood before a mirror, he would have seen a pulse of soft light pass through his eyes. On the night that Victor had drawn upon the power of a thunderbolt to enliven his first creation, the cooperative storm, of unprecedented violence, had seemed to leave in Deucalion the lightning’s glow, which manifested in his eyes from time to time.
    Although he sought redemption and eventually peace, although he cherished Truth and wished toserve it, Deucalion had long tried to deceive himself about the identity of the man whose head, whose
brain
, had been married to the patchwork body in Victor’s first lab. He said his brain was that of an unknown miscreant, which was true but only in that he’d never been told the man’s name or his crimes.
    The repetitive nightmare of the old stone house—with its cursed attic where something ticked and rattled, clicked and clattered; and its cellar in which the air itself was evil—returned to Deucalion so often that he knew as surely as he knew anything, the dream must be fragments of memories the donor had left behind somewhere among the sulci and the gyri of his gray matter. And the nature of those grim memories identified the hateful source of the brain.
    Now, ascending the hospital stairs toward the thin childlike cries of misery, he felt as if Earth’s gravity had doubled during the climb, for he carried not only the weight of this moment but also the weight of all those dreams and what they surely meant.
    When in the nightmare he had at last made it up the stairs into the attic of the house, the throbbing light of an oil lamp revealed to him the source of the clicking and clattering. The raging storm outside pressed drafts into that high room, and those blustering currents knocked the dangling bones against one another. The skeleton was small, strung together to keep it in order, suspended from a hook in a rafter.
    Also suspended from the hook was the only other thing of the victim that remained: the long golden hairthat had been shorn from her head. Bones and braids. Or call them trophies.
    But so much clicking and clattering could not arise from one young girl’s bones. When in the dream he had dared to venture farther into the attic, the lamplight revealed a grisly orphanage: nine other dangling skeletons and then, oh, ten more beyond, and yet another ten thereafter. Thirty young girls—all children, really—presented as mobiles, each with her hair hanging separately from her skull, blond hair or brown or auburn, straight or curly hair, some braided and some not.
    In hundreds of repetitions of that dream, he had only twice gotten into the attic before waking in a sweat of dread. He had
never
proceeded past the first room of the cellar, into the heart of that darkness, and he hoped he never would. The sound of skeletons in a wind dance drew him to the attic, but what always pulled him toward the dream-house cellar were those thin haunting cries. They were not shrieks of terror or of pain, but instead of sorrow, as if he were hearing not the victims yet alive but their spirits yearning for the world from which they had been taken before their time.
    He had so long resisted acknowledging the source of his brain; but he could not continue deceiving himself. His second heart had come from a child molester who killed those he raped—and his brain from the same donor. The murderer had done what he wanted with the girls and then