Chapter 38
The house was quiet.
Glen was asleep.
The Experimenter was not.
He explored the house in a more leisurely fashion than he had before; yesterday, and in the days before that, he had felt a sense of urgency, a need to make preparations. But yesterday, much of what he required had been procured, purchased, and brought into the house while Glen slept, stored carefully away in the basement, ready for his use when the time was ripe.
But not yet.
He was out of practice, and until he could once again perform his experiments perfectly, he wouldn’t perform them at all.
He had, after all, certain standards to maintain. Standards that had certainly not been maintained by the man he’d watched last night, the man who had carried a clumsily butchered victim through the darkness as if the simple absence of light would be enough to protect him from the consequences of what he had done.
It would not, of course. Soon—perhaps very soon—the Experimenter would administer a fitting punishment to the blundering imitator he had seen last night.
Today, though, he had other things to do. Today, while Glen slept and the house was quiet, he would begin brushing up on his skills, begin reacquiring the perfect manual dexterity he had lost in the years since events had required him to suspend his research. Thrilling to a growing sense of anticipation, the Experimenter finished his examination of the house, lingering only when he came to Anne Jeffers’s dresser. Opening each of the drawers, he ran his fingers over the soft satiny fabric of her lingerie.
In his mind he touched her skin.
A sigh built in the depths of his chest, and was finally expelled in a sound reminiscent of bellows fanning coals into fire. His fingers tightened for an instant, crushing the silk into a shapeless mass, but he quickly regained control of himself. Closing the drawer, the Experimenter left the room and went to the basement.
The purchases he’d made the day before—with the exception of the fishing rod Kevin had found—were hidden away in a battered footlocker he’d found supporting two boxes of dust-laden books. Moving the two boxes aside, taking care not to disturb the layer of dust that covered their tops, the Experimenter opened the trunk and took out several items: some nylon line, a spool of strong silken thread, some fishhooks, and a book. Carrying the items to the long workbench that stood against one of the basement’s walls, he set the items down and pulled the string that hung from the fixture suspended from the joists above. The light flickered for a second or two, then a bright fluorescent glow swept away the cellar’s shadowy gloom.
The Experimenter opened the book. It was a manual on fly-fishing, the hobby he had so often used to soothe the frustration that engulfed him when his experiments ended in failure. He began leafing quickly through the book until he found the section on hand-tied flies, then slowly turned the color plates one at a time. Though it would have appeared to an observer that he was only giving the illustrations cursory glances, the truth was exactly the opposite. In the second or two it took him to scan a page, his eyes took in every detail of the two dozen flies each plate displayed.
The fly he was looking for was on the twelfth plate, the second photograph from the left in the third row.
On the page opposite the illustration was a brief paragraph describing how each fly had been made. The fly that caught his attention had been constructed from the feathers of a parakeet, augmented with a small tuft of cat fur, giving it the look of a winged caterpillarlike creature.
The Experimenter knew precisely where he could obtain the materials he would need to duplicate the fly.
Leaving the basement, he went upstairs to the second floor. Boots, growling softly as he passed through the kitchen, followed after him. In Kevin’s room the parrot was in the process of removing the shell from a sunflower seed. Kumquat was sitting on Kevin’s small desk, her tail wrapped around her feet as she gazed longingly at the parrot.
As the Experimenter came into the room, the bird paused in his eating, bobbing his head menacingly, as if to guard his food from the unexpected visitor.
The Experimenter’s eyes fixed on the cat. “What do you think?” he asked. “Are you willing to volunteer a bit of that coat for a fishing fly?” The cat’s ears pricked and her nose twitched. The Experimenter smiled. “Suppose we make a bargain: If the bird gives up a feather, then you ought to be willing to contribute a little fuzz, right?”
Moving closer to the parrot’s cage, the Experimenter saw a feather lying on its floor. He opened the door and reached inside, but just as his fingers grasped the feather, Hector’s beak closed on his thumb. Wincing at the pain, the Experimenter jerked his hand from the cage, shutting the door just in time to thwart Hector’s second attack. “A little slow,” the Experimenter observed while the bird ruffled its feathers and glared at him through the bars of the cage. “And after all, you pulled it out yourself, didn’t you?” Turning to the cat, the Experimenter held the bright green feather high. “The bird has made his offering,” he said. “And so shall you.” Picking Kumquat up, he started back to the cellar.
Boots, whining nervously, followed.
At the far end of the workbench was a partially completed—and obviously abandoned—model of a three-masted schooner, a picture of which was still pinned to the wall above the hull. Around the hull, covered with dust, were various miniature tools that had been bought for the model ship, only to be forgotten along with the rest of the project. Gathering the tools together, the Experimenter moved them to an open area of the bench in preparation for his task. The book, propped open to display the fly he intended to duplicate, leaned against the wall.
Inserting a bare hook into a small device equipped with infinitely adjustable alligator clamps, the Experimenter set to work, appropriating glue from the model ship supplies to facilitate the attachment of fragments of Hector’s feather to the fishhook.
Picking up an X-Acto knife, the Experimenter held it over the bright green feather. How long had it been since he’d tested his skill? But his hand was steady and the knife felt familiar. The fingers of his left hand held the feather flat on the workbench while his right hand expertly manipulated the X-Acto knife. In only a few minutes he had cut out four perfectly shaped pieces of feather, each of them cut into a graceful contour identical to those shown in the book.
Barely pausing to admire what he’d done, the Experimenter continued working, his fingers deftly wrapping thread around the tiny stems of the scraps of feather, binding them to the shank of the hook with perfect dexterity.
Only when the feathers had been flawlessly placed on the hook did the Experimenter finally step back to gaze at the object he’d created. Though he’d applied a tiny bit of glue to the hook before fastening the feathers, none of it showed; not a single drop had oozed through the perfectly wound and knotted thread whose ends had magically disappeared beneath their own turns. Like the wings of a tiny butterfly, the fragments of Hector’s plumage glittered in the bright fluorescent light, and already the Experimenter could see the finished fly flitting above the surface of a stream, floating on its tiny wings, luring a trout from the water’s depths.
All that remained was to tie a tuft of Kumquat’s fur to the hook, forming a nearly weightless body for the fanciful insect he’d constructed. Reaching down, the Experimenter picked up the cat once more and held it against his chest, turning so the cat’s eyes would see the tiny object held in the alligator clamps. “Look at that,” he crooned softly. “Isn’t that pretty? You don’t mind giving up a little fur just to finish it with, do you?”
Kumquat, as if sensing that something unpleasant was about to happen, stirred in the Experimenter’s arms, and he tightened his grip. The cat, feeling the pressure of his fingers, struggled against the constraining force, and its heart began to beat faster.
The Experimenter’s fingers began to tingle. He could feel energy flowing into him, an energy that was almost electric.
Life. He was feeling the energy of life itself, experiencing the force that transformed the animal in his hands from nothing more than a vastly intricate construction of elemental molecules into a living entity. And once again the question rose in his mind: How does it work?
The Experimenter gazed down at Kumquat. The cat struggled in his arms, trying to wriggle free from his grip, but the Experimenter’s hands only closed more tightly.
Deep in his soul, the Experimenter knew it was time to begin his research again. It was almost as if the cat had been fated to come into his hands as a harbinger of his renascent career.
Scanning the basement, he spotted a cardboard box, its lid still intact. Placing Kumquat into the box, he moved through the basement, finding all the things he needed.
Some carbon tetrachloride. If he soaked a rag in the toxic chemical, and put the rag in the box with the cat, it would be almost as effective as the ether he’d sometimes used in the past.
A plastic drop cloth, apparently left over from some paint job. Spread out on the workbench, it would contain whatever blood the cat might spill.
The Experimenter took off his clothes, packing them carefully away in the footlocker until he was done.
When all the preparations were finally made, and the cat lay unconscious on the workbench, the Experimenter picked up the X-Acto knife. The soul of the Experimenter swelled with joy. Finally, he was taking up his work once more.
He worked slowly at first, relishing every movement, the techniques of dissection coming back to him as if it had been no more than a day since his last experiment, rather than years.
Deftly, he sliced through the skin of the cat’s breast, stanching the flow of blood as best he could with the materials he had found.
He made a pair of transverse cuts, then laid the skin back, exposing the thin layer of tissue that covered the sternum and the rib cage. He pressed the trigger of the small Makita saw he’d purchased yesterday, its keening whine sounding to him as sweet as the familiar strains of a favorite symphony. With a steady hand, he lowered the blade, and savored the change in the saw’s pitch as it sank into the cartilage and bone of the cat’s breast In no more than a few seconds the saw had sundered the rib cage, providing the Experimenter free access to the organ that had fascinated him for years.
Laying the saw aside, he spread the rib cage open and slipped his fingers between the lungs to touch the cat’s heart. Gently, he worked the pulsing organ loose, lifting it up just enough to cup it in his palm. He watched its throbbing contractions, thrilling to the energy he could feel flowing through his skin.
At last he was working again.
And it felt good. So good.
Then an image came into his mind, an image of Anne Jeffers. Her face seemed to be suspended before him, and as he gazed into her eyes, the Experimenter’s fingers closed around the still-throbbing heart in his hand. Just as when he’d held Anne’s lingerie a little while ago, the Experimenter’s grip on Kumquat’s heart tightened.
As with the lingerie, he crushed the heart into a shapeless mass.
Shapeless, and lifeless.