“Yeah,” Michael said, tossing the pencil back on the desk, “all done.”
He went back to his room but Darryl had already turned in, and there was no way in the world Michael was going to be able to fall asleep—not without a couple of sleeping pills, and he was trying to cut back on those, anyway, in preparation for his reentry to the real world. He packed up his laptop and a bunch of his papers and, slinging his backpack over his shoulders, braved the last of the storm to head over to the rec room and set up shop. Murphy had said that the weather report indicated a brief but temperate window the next day, which might allow them time to go back to Stromviken in search of the elusive Lieutenant Copley.
Having heard so much about him from Eleanor, Michael was especially curious to make his acquaintance.
He got a cup of coffee from the standing machine and turned off the TV, which was playing a DVD of Notting Hill; Betty and Tina must have been the last ones in there. But the place was blissfully empty. The wall clock indicated it was just past midnight. Michael turned on the CD player instead, and a blast of Beethoven—even he recognized the opening of the Fifth Symphony—came on. It was a compilation CD, and no doubt belonged to one of the beakers. He lowered the volume, plunked himself down at a card table in the back, and spread out his work.
Don’t think about Kristin, he told himself, when he realized he’d been sitting there for at least one full movement of the symphony thinking of nothing but. Think about something else. His eyes fell on the work he’d brought—most notably the loose pages Ackerley had been scribbling on in the old meat locker—and he almost laughed. When it came to pleasant distractions, the South Pole was noticeably lacking.
Ackerley’s handwriting was a spidery scrawl, reminding Michael of the labels the man had carefully affixed to every drawer of moss and lichen samples in his botany lab. But these pages were especially hard to read, smudged as they were with blood and written on the back of billing invoices and inventory sheets.
The first page or two—carefully numbered, as Ackerley had promised, in the upper-right-hand corner—recounted the attack, how he had turned to see Danzig lumbering down the aisle toward his lab counter. “I remember being thrown to the floor—destroying a meticulously cultivated orchid (genus Cymbidium) in the fall—and being set upon with great force and no provocation. The assault, though apparently random and senseless, did ultimately reveal itself to be deliberate in its intent.”
Michael sat back, stunned. He really had to hand it to him; even after being savagely mauled—and rising from the dead, as it were—Ackerley had managed to retain his scientific composure and prose style. The notes, written in a meat locker under what might only be called extreme duress, read like an article being submitted to a scholarly journal for peer review.
“Upon consideration, Mr. Danzig’s efforts,”—Mr. Danzig?—“however wild and distracted, were all directed toward the breaking of the skin and accessing the blood supply. What the reasons for that might have been, or the particular components of the blood that were most sought after, was unclear at the time of the event, and remain so. I am, however, inevitably reminded of the Nepenthes ventricosa and its own hematophagous needs.”
His sangfroid was beyond belief.
“Death—in any previously understood construction of the term—occurred no more than a minute or so into the event. The interval between that time and what I shall hereinafter refer to as the Revival is unknown to me, though as I have ascertained no material decay it can’t have been excessive. (Must consult morbidity and decomposition graphs.) Quick refrigeration of my remains appears to have helped considerably.”
The next few lines were hopelessly smudged, and Michael had to go looking for the next sequentially numbered page. They were scattered all over the tabletop in front of him, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
“The Revival was gradual,” Ackerley continued, in the margins of a purchase order, “much like awakening from a deep, possibly hypnagogic state. The line between the dream state and the real was imperceptibly crossed, though it was immediately followed by a sense of panic and disorientation. I was in total darkness, confined somehow, and the fear of premature burial was, of course, paramount in my mind; to be blunt, I screamed and fought against the constraints, and was greatly relieved to establish that I was encased only in plastic sheets, which were permeable and easily shredded.”