Dead and Alive

eventually be plowed level before being capped with eight feet of earth and methane-gas vent pipes.
    The stench offended, but he had encountered worse in the past two hundred years. In his first two decades, after leaving Victor for dead in the arctic, Deucalion frequently had been seized by the urge to violence, raging at the injustice of having been stitched together and animated by a narcissistic would-be god who could give his creation neither meaning nor peace, nor any hope of fellowship and community. In his most haunted and self-pitying hours, Deucalion prowled graveyards and broke into granite crypts, mausoleums, where he tore open caskets and forced himself to gaze upon the decomposing corpses, saying aloud to himself, “Here is what you are,just dead flesh, dead flesh, the bones and guts of arsonists, of murderers, filled with false life, dead and alive, not fit for any other world but an abomination in this one.” Standing at those open caskets, he’d known stenches that, by comparison, made this Louisiana dump smell as sweet as a rose garden.
    In those graveyard visits, during those long staring matches with sightless cadavers, he had yearned to die. Although he tried, he was unable to submit to a well-stropped razor or to a hangman’s noose that he fashioned, and at every cliff’s edge, he could not take the final step. So in those long nights when he kept company with the dead, he argued with himself to embrace the necessity for self-destruction.
    The proscription against suicide had not come from Victor.
    In his earliest strivings for godhood, that vainglorious beast wasn’t able to program his first creation as well as he programmed those he brewed up these days. Victor had planted a device in Deucalion’s skull, which had cratered half the giant’s face when he tried to strike his maker. But Victor had not in those days been able to forbid suicide.
    After years marked by a frustrated death wish as much as by rage, Deucalion had arrived at a humbling realization. The edict that so effectively stayed his hand from destroying himself came from a more powerful and infinitely more mysterious source than Victor. He was denied felo-de-se because he had a purpose in life, even if he could not—at that time—recognizewhat it might be, a vital mission that he must fulfill before final peace would be granted him.
    Two hundred years had at last brought him to Louisiana, to this reeking wasteyard that was a trash dump
and
a graveyard. The pending storm would be not merely one of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain, but also one of justice, judgment, execution, and damnation.
    To his left, far out in the west pit, flames flickered. A dozen small fires moved one behind the other, as if they were torches held by people in a procession.

CHAPTER 42
    ERIKA STOOD over the body of Christine for a minute, trying to understand why Victor had shot her to death.
    Although Christine seemed to have become convinced that she was someone other than herself, she had not been threatening. Quite the opposite: She had been confused and distraught, and in spite of her contention that she was not “as fragile a spirit” as she might look, she had the air of a shy, uncertain girl not yet a woman.
    Yet Victor shot her four times in her two hearts. And kicked her head twice, after she was dead.
    Instead of wrapping the body for whoever would collect it and at once cleaning up the blood as instructed, Christine surprised herself by returning to the troll’s quarters in the north wing. She knocked softly and said sotto voce,
“It’s me, Erika,”
because she didn’t want to disturb the little guy if he was sitting ina corner, sucking on his toes, his mind having gone away to the red place to rest.
    With a discretion that matched hers, he said,
“Come in,” just
loud enough for her to hear him when she pressed her ear to the door.
    In the living room, she found him sitting on the floor in front of the dark fireplace, as if flames warmed the hearth.
    Sitting beside him, she said, “Did you hear the gunshots?”
    “No. Jocko heard nothing.”
    “I thought you must have heard them and might be frightened.”
    “No. And Jocko wasn’t juggling apples, either. Not Jocko. Not here in his rooms.”
    “Apples? I didn’t bring you apples.”
    “You are very kind to Jocko.”
    “Would you like some apples?”
    “Three oranges would be better.”
    “I’ll bring you some oranges later. Is there anything else you would