Dead and Alive

rendered them in the cellar to extract their delicate skeletons as mementos, whichwas why in the dream the stagnant air of that window-less lower realm tasted sometimes of spoiled suet and sometimes of salty tears.
    The possession of a child molester’s brain didn’t make Deucalion a child molester himself. That evil mind and that corrupted soul had departed the brain at death, leaving behind nothing but three pounds or so of blameless cerebral tissue, which Victor had taken to preserve immediately after the execution, by arrangement with the hangman. Deucalion’s consciousness was uniquely his own, and its origins were … elsewhere. Whether his consciousness came in tandem with a soul, he could not say. But he had no doubt that he arrived that long-ago night with a mission—to enforce the natural laws that Victor had broken with his prideful experiments and, by killing him, thereby repair the torn fabric of the world.
    Following a journey that had taken him around the Earth more than once and across two troubled centuries, in search of a new purpose after he thought Victor died on the arctic ice, Deucalion at last arrived here at the threshold of his destiny. The destruction of the New Race was under way, brought about by the endless errors of their maker. And soon Deucalion would bring justice to Victor Frankenstein in the storm of anarchy and terror now breaking over Louisiana.
    Now another childlike expression of sorrow, another more suggestive of despair, greeted him as he reached the next landing. The cries came from this floor.
    He suspected that by his actions in the hoursahead, he would earn his release from the dreams of the old stone house. He took a deep breath, hesitated, then opened the door and stepped out of the stairwell into the corridor.
    About a dozen of the New Race, male and female, stood here and there along the wide hallway. Their attention was focused on the open pair of doors to a laboratory on the right, at the midpoint of the building.
    From that room came another plaintive cry, thrashing noises, the shattering of glass.
    When Deucalion moved past some of the people standing in the hall, not one seemed to register his presence, so intent were they on the crisis in the laboratory. They stood in various postures of expectation. Some trembled or even shook violently with fear, some muttered angrily, and some appeared to be in the grip of a strange transcendental awe.
    Through the open doors of the laboratory, into the corridor came Hell on six legs.

CHAPTER 32
    FOR THE MOMENT , cold does not matter.
    The transparent polymeric fabric of the imprisoning sack and the glass door of the freezer are for the first time not a torment to Chameleon.
    The recently arrived, unusual, very busy, blue, not-a-person something goes back and forth, back and forth through the lab with great energy.
    This visitor seems intent on creating a new order. It is an agent of change.
    Cabinets topple. Chairs fly. Lab equipment is knocked helter-skelter.
    In its pendulous sack of ice-flecked fluid, Chameleon can’t hear voices. However, the vibrations of this vigorous reordering are transmitted through walls and floor to the freezer and thus to its occupant.
    The lights dim, swell brighter, dim, fade further, but then brighten once more.
    The freezer motor stutters and dies. The backup motor does not come online.
    Chameleon is alert for the distinct pattern of second-motor vibrations. Nothing. Nothing.
    This interesting and energetic visitor draws some people to it, lifts them up, as if in celebration, as if to exalt them, but then casts them down.
    They remain where they have fallen, motionless.
    Other workers seem to approach the busy visitor of their own volition. They appear almost to embrace it.
    These also are lifted up, and then they are cast down. They lie as motionless as the others who were cast down before them.
    Perhaps they have prostrated themselves at the feet of the busy visitor.
    Or they may be asleep. Or dead.
    Interesting.
    When all the once-busy workers are motionless, the visitor tears the faucets out of a lab sink and casts them down, making the water gush forth.
    The water falls upon the workers, the water falls, yet they do not rise.
    And no second-motor vibrations are as yet transmitted to the fluid in the imprisoning sack.
    A stillness has come over the sack. The saline solution is without tremors and without hum.
    Busy, busy, the visitor uproots the lab sink from its mountings, tosses it