Chapter 24
On the morning after his release from the hospital, Glen Jeffers came awake slowly, just for a moment feeling the same cloudy disorientation he’d experienced so often during those first few days after the heart attack, when his mind, fogged with drugs, had refused to recognize his surroundings. But this morning his mind cleared quickly, and he luxuriated in the feeling of awakening in his own pajamas, in his own bed, in his own house. And it had been his wife who had awakened him briefly a while ago to kiss him good-bye, rather than one of the nurses arriving abruptly to strap a sphygmomanometer around his arm, insert a thermometer under his tongue, or stick a clip on his finger to check his oxygen absorption.
Home.
He was home, and he was alone.
He stretched languorously, listening to the silence of the house. How long had it been since he’d enjoyed this kind of quiet?
He could barely even remember.
Of course, it had been quiet in the hospital, but it was a different kind of quiet: the hospital held the sepulchral silence of illness, rather than the peaceful quiet of home. In the hospital he had always been aware of someone coughing or moaning in the adjoining rooms. This morning he could only hear Hector muttering to himself from the perch in his cage in Kevin’s room. And from beyond the house Glen heard only the chirping of more birds, a distinct improvement over the steady drone of traffic that had laid a continual noisy siege to the hospital.
Feeling at peace, he got up, slipped into his bathrobe, shoved his feet into his comfortably dilapidated slippers, and went downstairs, following the heavenly scent of fresh-brewed coffee into the kitchen, where a note in Anne’s handwriting was propped up against the coffee maker:
You shouldn’t drink this at all, so try to hold it down to one cup.
It was at the very moment that his eyes fell on the note that he first had the strange sensation that he wasn’t alone in the house after all. It was as if he were being watched: the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he felt himself tensing. But when he turned around, the kitchen was empty; not even Boots was there. The odd feeling passed, and he reached into the cupboard, took out the largest mug he could find, and filled it to the rim. Moving to the kitchen table, he sat down. A moment later Kumquat, obviously assuming he held no ill will against her disinterest at his homecoming yesterday, darted in from the dining room and leapt into his lap. Stroking the cat with one hand, he pulled the front section of the morning’s Herald over and gazed at the article prominently displayed at the top of the page to which the paper had been opened.
Police Report No Progress
in Capitol Hill Slaying
Nearly a week after the discovery of the body of Shawnelle Davis in her Capitol Hill apartment, Seattle police report that there are still no suspects in the slaying of the thirty-two-year-old prostitute.
Although police investigators admit that the killing bears certain resemblances to those attributed to Richard Kraven, they are currently ruling out the possibility that this may be a copy-cat crime, despite suggestions that the execution of Kraven himself might have inspired the killing. According to Detective Mark Blakemoor …
Glen pushed the paper aside, not bothering to finish the story even though he was absolutely certain his wife had written it. Why was Anne still harping on Richard Kraven? The man was dead, for God’s sake! Picking up the sports section, he scanned the headlines, then turned to the business section. Buried in a lower corner of the second page he found a small story noting that not only had work on the Jeffers Building continued to progress during his illness, but they were actually two days ahead of schedule. He reread the short article, wondering if the implication that the work was progressing better with him out of the picture was intended or inadvertent, then decided that it wasn’t there at all, that he was just being oversensitive. Still, a call to the office after he’d had a shower couldn’t really be considered work, could it?
Abandoning both the paper and the mug of coffee, he started toward the stairs, but once again the peculiar feeling that someone else was in the house came over him. This time he went through the downstairs rooms, feeling more and more foolish as each one proved to be as empty as it should have been. Still, even when he finally went upstairs to the bathroom, he found himself glancing through the open doors to the kids’ rooms, just to be sure.
Nothing.
He stripped off his robe and pajamas in the master bedroom and went into the bathroom. Turning on the shower, he waited until steam was pouring out of the stall, then adjusted the temperature so it was just off the scalding point. With a sigh of pleasure he stepped into the stinging spray, lathered himself luxuriantly, then let the steaming water sluice over him, relaxing his muscles as it washed the last of the hospital odor from his skin. Only when he felt the water beginning to cool and realized he’d nearly exhausted the heater’s supply did he shut off the faucets, step out onto the cold marble tiles of the bathroom floor and begin toweling himself dry. After taking a swipe at the steamy mirror on the bathroom door, he tossed the soggy towel toward the hamper that stood next to the sink, missed, but let it lay where it fell as he caught a smeared glimpse of himself in the still mostly fogged mirror.
He’d lost at least ten pounds while he was in the hospital, and it wasn’t a ten pounds he was happy to have gone. In fact, he’d spent months gaining those pounds, exercising, running, doing all the right things. Now they were gone, and he was nearly back to the skinny frame he’d hated so much during the first thirty years of his life, before he’d discovered working out.
Well, he’d just have to start over, regain the weight, and retone the muscles that had gone flaccid while he lay in the hospital bed.
Turning away from the full-length mirror, he moved to the sink, brushed his teeth, then used his hand to wipe a small patch of the mirror above the sink. Bending close, he examined his reflection.
Christ! He looked like a homeless person: his cheeks had hollowed, his eyes were sunken, and the laugh lines around them were threatening to turn into genuine wrinkles. Worst of all, the stubble on his cheeks and jowls had taken on a gray cast he’d never noticed before.
That, at least, he could fix right now.
Opening the medicine cabinet, he picked up the shaver Heather and Kevin had given him for his last birthday and switched it on.
Suddenly, the sensation that he was no longer alone—that someone else was not only in the house, but in the bathroom itself—became overpowering. Every muscle in his body tensing, Glen readied himself to whirl around to confront whoever was there. But even as he turned, the shock struck him, and he tumbled once more into the kind of blackness that had yawned beneath him on the day of his heart attack. In less than a second he was unconscious.
* * *
The Experimenter gazed at the razor that had dropped into the sink as Glen Jeffers had fallen into unconsciousness.
Tentatively, he reached out and touched it lightly with a single finger. Then he picked it up, turning it over in his hand, examining it the way he liked to examine everything he came in contact with. It seemed perfectly all right—no cracks in its case; its hard plastic shell hadn’t even chipped when it struck the porcelain of the sink. Satisfied, he held the appliance to his face and gently rubbed it over his right cheek.
And instantly dropped it as millions of tiny electric needles seemed to shoot from the shaving head into his skin.
Picking the shaver up again, the Experimenter turned it over in his hand once more.
There was a flaw in it—there had to be.
There were flaws in everything, if you looked closely enough. He’d found that out from all the examinations he’d conducted. In even the most perfect of the specimens he’d observed, he’d always been able to find a flaw. So now he turned his full concentration to the shaver, focusing his mind, searching for the cause of the shocks he’d just felt. Yet no matter how hard he looked, he could find no sign of damage.
The object sat in his hand, purring and vibrating almost like a living thing.
The Experimenter’s mind began to work once more, and his yearning to understand the force he’d felt grew stronger.
Had it truly been electricity he’d felt?
He pressed the shaver against his skin, and felt again the prickling tingle.
This time, though, it felt slightly different.
Different, and familiar.
He moved the appliance over the skin of his face, and now he imagined it was something else.
The touch of a finger, stroking him gently, exciting him.
The stroke of a woman.
Yes, that was it. It felt like the stroke of a woman, and he’d felt it before. The same erotically caressing sensation, as if an electrical charge were flowing out of her.
But how could it be flowing out of the thing in his hand?
It wasn’t alive, it held no blood, carried no spirit, no energy of its own. It was only an object, totally inanimate. Yet the tingling … the tingling … He had to know.
Had to experiment, as he always had before.
Clutching the shaver with the same grip he’d used on all his subjects—tight enough for security, but not so tightly as to harm—the Experimenter carried it to the basement below the house.
Excitement was growing in him—the same excitement he’d always felt before one of his experiments—and it was good to feel it again.
He’d been idle too long.
He pulled the string of the fluorescent light suspended above the three two-by-twelve planks that formed a rough workbench. Laying the shaver down, he glanced around the area, finding a toolbox at the end of the bench, exactly where it should be. Rummaging through it, he found a set of miniature tools. Choosing a tiny Phillips screwdriver, he set to work.
As always, he worked in the nude.
Twenty minutes later the shaver lay in pieces, the major section of its black case broken into three fragments. Its motor and battery sat next to the case, the wires of the motor torn away from their connections to the battery. The gears that connected the three blades were scattered on the bench, and the Experimenter knew they would never be fitted together again.
Like all his previous researches, this one, too, had ultimately failed.
The Experimenter stood trembling in the basement, glowering at the ruined shaver, his frustration and anger growing by the second.
Why hadn’t he been able to find what he’d been searching for?
Why hadn’t he been able to determine from where the energy in the shaver had been leaking?
He knew he’d felt it—even now he could almost feel the tingling on his face!
It should have been perfectly simple. An idiot should have been able to take the machine apart, find the flaw, fix it, and reassemble it!
After all, it wasn’t a living tiling. It was only an object!
And now it was broken beyond repair, or at least beyond his ability to repair it Seized suddenly by a desire to be rid of the offending object—a desire that was at least as strong as had been his urge to disassemble it—the Experimenter picked up the pieces of the shaver, mounted the stairs, and left the house through the back door. Crossing the yard, he strode past the garage, toward the back fence where the four recycling barrels were lined up.
Lifting the lid of the first one that came to hand, he threw the broken shaver inside, slammed the lid back onto the can, and started back toward the house.
He was halfway across the yard when he heard a faint gasp.
Stopping short, the Experimenter glanced around, his attention immediately caught by a flicker of movement from the house next door.
He was being watched.
A blowzy-looking woman had been about to step out onto her back porch. The Experimenter gazed coldly at her, and for a brief moment their eyes locked. Then, as if frightened by what she was seeing, the woman’s face turned scarlet and she backed away, disappearing into her house as suddenly as she’d come. Her back door slammed sharply behind her.
Only when she was gone did the Experimenter finally turn away and start once more back toward the house from which he’d emerged only a few moments ago.
The razor was already forgotten.
Now he was thinking about the woman next door, and an idea was beginning to form in his mind.
But was it really time to begin again?
And was the woman truly a proper subject?
He would have to think about it.
Think about it, and make preparations.