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The video image of the empty morgue rolled on, minutes transformed into seconds, with the shadows remaining constant except for the distortion caused by the enhanced speed. Except for the constant unreeling of the chronometer, the image might have been a still photograph. Then, abruptly, the image changed.
Ferro and LaMastra watched the video image with faces that had become white, not just from the reflection of the black-and-white video image, but from shock and a growing, gnawing horror.
Chapter 27
The image on Weinstock’s TV showed an unreal world of flat grays and whites and blacks. The stainless steel gleamed without twinkling; the shadows were precise and unchanging geometric shapes; the dim security lights were surrounded by frozen clouds of light. Only the inexorable count of the digital clock at the lower right-hand corner of the screen argued the reality of the passage of time. The stillness of the scene was ordinary at first, just a reflection of an event as detached from the present as something recorded on a cave wall twenty-five thousand years ago.
Dr. Weinstock raised one hand, finger extended, and pointed. His whole arm trembled. In a whisper he said, “There. ”
The detectives looked at him briefly and then back at the video image and saw nothing. At first. Then there was a brief moment of vibration; then a muffled thud from somewhere offscreen, then a long silence broken by a second thump.
Nothing happened for nearly a full minute. Then there was another movement. It began as a tremble, a hesitant shift of the left-hand door that led from the autopsy suite to the adjoining cold room. The door shifted as if pressed, but it did not open, as if the pushing hand were uncertain, or confused. It began to open, dropped closed, began again to open. Cl
osed again. Then abruptly it banged open hard and fast, reeling away from a powerful blow. The swinging door flew to the end of its closer, jolted to a halt, and then began to fall back toward the frame, but now something was blocking the way, and the closing door bounced off the hard shoulder of something that moved in a slow and plodding way.
LaMastra gasped out loud, leaning sharply forward.
“Oh my…God!” breathed Ferro.
In the doorway, blocking the close of the door, stood a man. He was naked and tall. Fair hair stuck out in all directions, tacky with fluids. He stood there, swaying slightly, staring with eyes that seemed to be dazed from sleep. His skin was milk white, turned to a luminescent blue by the videotape. The door hid half of his body, but the center of his torso was clearly visible, and both detectives could see the long lines of lightly stitched incisions. One stretched from shoulder to shoulder all the way across the chest in a lazy line that sagged toward the middle of the breastbone, where it met the longer cut that dropped all the way down past chest and stomach to the groin. The horrible Y-shaped ventral incision was held together only with temporary stitches, and in the gaps dark and unsavory shapes of organs and muscles bunched and shifted in their plastic bag with each step. The throat was the worst thing, though. The flesh there was a mass of torn strips of skin, ripped and shredded, held in place only by thin lengths of surgical tape.
With slow and uncertain steps, the figure moved into the autopsy suite, staggering a bit as it walked, as if uncertain how to use its legs. The milk-white hands twitched as if stung by live electrical wires, and the figure’s mouth hung open, lips slack and rubbery. The eyes stared as if newly awakened, a bulging fixity of focus, but as the figure moved closer to the camera, those eyes seemed almost artificial, like the glass eyes of a stuffed deer.
“Dear sweet God,” murmured Ferro. “That…that’s Jimmy Castle!”
Someone made a gagging sound, and Weinstock looked over at LaMastra, who had his hands clamped to his mouth. Crow rose and handed him a plastic trash can. LaMastra took it without comment and wrapped both arms around it, holding his head over it, eyes fixed with manic concentration on the TV. He did not throw up, though he gagged again and again.
Castle stumbled, tripping over his own feet, and pitched forward almost out of shot, falling hard but making no attempt to stop his fall or protect himself. There was a horrible meaty thud as Castle’s cheekbone struck the unyielding corner of the nearest surgical table. He toppled off and vanished out of frame.
“No…” said Ferro, his dark brown skin sickened to a toxic gray.
There was more movement. Not from the figure that had fallen, but from the doorway, where a second figure was slowly pushing through the door. It, too, was naked, but was darker, heavier, taller, with coarse black hair that matted its milky skin like an animal’s pelt. This second figure had the same long and terrible Y-shaped ventral incision and the same mass of torn skin on its throat held in place by adhesive strips. Ferro and LaMastra watched in stunned horror as Nels Cowan shambled into the room. Cowan stared blindly at the security camera for a while, not with any deliberate focus, but because his face was in line with the lens. Cowan’s face was horrible. The features were slack as if the muscle and flesh just hung from the skull with no internal anchor, a mask draped loosely over a set of empty bones. There was a long incision across the top of the scalp from ear to ear, stitched now to stay in place. Ferro knew, even if LaMastra was spared the knowledge, that during an autopsy the whole front section of the scalp was peeled forward to expose the skull, then the front of the skull itself sawn off to allow the pathologist access for removing the brain. The long line of sutures showed where Weinstock had reattached the lower part of the scalp and all of the forehead flesh. LaMastra’s stomach writhed with icy worms and sour sickness.
Cowan’s face filled the screen and for a while did nothing but stand there, but that was horrifying enough. That face, empty of life but filled with an impossible animation, dominated the whole of Weinstock’s office from where it looked out of the TV screen.
Behind Cowan, blurry now that the auto-focus had shifted to Cowan, something moved. Ferro leaned forward to see, and watched in horror as Jimmy Castle slowly got to his feet. It was an effort of incredible clumsiness, as if the muscles and bones and tendons of Castle’s body had no single point of direction, no memory of how to work in concert. It was a parody of human movement that nonetheless possessed no scrap of comedy. Castle flailed and thrashed, flopping three or four times back onto the floor, each time with a hard-bone crack but no grunt of pain or gasp of effort. There was no humanity to the action, just an effort of a construct to master the mechanics of standing, but even seeing it in such an antiseptic way did not keep the grotesque horror of it from making Ferro’s mind reel and LaMastra’s stomach churn.
Both detectives were sweating badly. Weinstock opened his desk drawer and took out a full bottle of Glenlivet and three paper cups. As he unscrewed the top his eyes were locked on the screen, seeing the images he had watched over and over again, seeing them new again through the eyes of the cops.
Jimmy Castle managed to get to its feet, and somehow in its last efforts there had been some kind of a change, some improvement in the link between body and directing force, as if the flesh had remembered the way in which it was supposed to work. Muscles bunched under the pale, pale skin, and the figure rose slowly from an awkward crouch, straightening inch by inch to stand on firm footing. The body swayed but did not fall.
In the foreground, the face of Nels Cowan had taken on a different cast. Where moments before the eyes had been as lifeless and empty as marbles, now there was something…a faintness of life, a subtle flickering of energy, and as they all watched those eyes seemed to come to a slow and very gradual focus, actually seeing the camera instead of just pointing in the that direction. There was no specific recognition of what the camera was, it was more that the camera was simply the very first thing those eyes noticed. Cowan’s eyes were black windows that looked into a vast, dark space, but now something in that darkness moved. Those eyes stared and stared, and then, slowly, they shifted as if Cowan had discovered that there were muscles that could make the eyes move. He looked right and left, up and down, just experimenting with the mechanics, then found a new and specific focus as Cowan raised his hands to eye level. He looked down at the hands, as white as candle wax and wasted from the massive loss of blood and other body fluids.
For just a moment, it seemed to Ferro and LaMastra that expression flickered through those eyes, something like awareness, or shock, or fear; but if those emotions were there they lingered only briefly and then flitted away as Cowan turned his hands over and peered at them closely. He closed his hands into fists and there was a dry cracking sound as the unlubricated tendons creaked and popped. Opening the fingers, Cowan stared at his palms, and that left the backs of the hands clearly visible to the camera’s unwinking eye.
LaMastra gasped. “Frank, look at his nails!”
Ferro nodded mutely, too stunned to speak. Each of Nels Cowan’s fingernails had changed, had become thicker, darker, almost black, the new growth of nail splitting the flesh of each finger, curling out like talons. Not as long as an animal’s nails, or even as long as many women wore them, but too long for the hands of a man who had been a working cop, and the thickness and sharpness of them was alien and awful.
Cowan opened and closed his hands several times, turning them to stare at them with a kind of animalistic wonder. His face showed the very first flick of emotion as he considered his taloned hands. There was just the barest hint of a smile on his blue-white lips, just enough to show the even edges of his white teeth. Even, except for the incisors.
“No,” said LaMastra firmly. “Fucking no!”
The incisors were long. Far longer than they should have been, far longer than they had any right to be. Too long. Impossibly, insanely long for a human mouth.
“Goddamn it—NO!” yelled LaMastra. He slammed the trash can down on the floor and wheeled on Weinstock. “This is bullshit, man. This is some kind of stupid Halloween bullshit!”
Weinstock didn’t answer. What could he say? He threw an imploring look at Val and Crow, but she was looking down at the lacings of her shoes and Crow was giving the TV a thousand-yard stare.
