The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (47 page)

I looked for a light
switch, spotted one on the wall a foot from the open door and
flipped it on. Harsh light blazed from four fluorescent fixtures in
the ceiling. I squinted briefly, then walked past the end of those
wooden bins, turned sharply and was looking into a large cluttered
room.

For a few seconds, I
didn’t have any idea what I was looking at. There were several long
tables, some covered with retorts and Petri dishes and strange
collections of coils and tubes and wires, things I’d never seen
before. A few feet away on my right were several dark green upright
cylinders like those that contain oxygen and other liquefied
gasses. On their left was what looked like a barrel about half the
size of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum, but made of seamless and
smoothly polished stainless steel. A pair of thin transparent tubes
entered the bottom of the barrel, and a similar pair entered—or
exited—at the top. I didn’t know what the thing did, but it was
doing something, making a constant low humming sound.

Nearer, on my right, was a
large and bulky piece of equipment almost the size of a piano but
with its upper face covered by dials; a protruding shelf below the
array of dials, was fitted with perhaps a dozen upright pens, most
of them wiggling, with their points leaving wavering lines on white
paper tape moving beneath them. The wide strip of paper tape folded
slowly into a large cardboard box resting on the floor.

From the back side of that
bulky piece of equipment, a shelf of wires rose, very fine
insulated wires running over pipes and through loops. Most of them
extended toward something at the far end of the room from me, but a
dozen or so swept just over my head and continued on to my left,
and down.

At that moment, I
saw...something. At first I thought it was slow movement, glimpsed
from the corner of my eye. But it wasn’t anything moving. I pulled
my head left, looked, stared at the thing. At first I thought it
was a dog.

It was on a solid, square
metal table about ten feet away. I stepped toward it, suddenly
filled with a strange tremulous apprehension, as though my nerves
were also thin wires, stretched too tight. There was a musty,
almost oily, smell in the room, different from the sharper stink
I’d noticed outside in the hallway. Clearly, this was what those
fine wires led to, and where those four fine transparent tubes led
also, carrying fluids from or to that humming barrel-like machine.
Apparently the piano-sized instrument with those dials and wiggling
pens was recording electrical impulses from this plastic-tube-fed
source.

The source was a dog’s
head.

The top of the dog’s skull
had been surgically removed, a six-inch-long oval neatly excised—as
in the smaller skulls of those two Siamese cats dead in the
burn-bin—and the ends of those ten or twelve fine wires were buried
in the living brain. Living, because both eyes in the dog’s head
were functioning, moving, following me as I approached and stopped
a foot before it.

The dog’s head. Head only.
It wasn’t a dog. It was the severed and nutrient-fed and
electronically monitored—but alive—head of a dog. It was a
shocking, stunning thing to see, that head without a body, grisly
obscene. Near this end of the metal table was a small white
plastic-covered box, its tip about five feet above the laboratory
floor. And atop the box rested the dog’s head. Nothing else
remained of him, no body, no legs or paws, no wagging tail. Just
the head and part of the neck wound with thick white gauze at its
base; below the truncated neck and surgical gauze only the white
box, much too small for a dog’s body but large enough for the four
transparent tubes that stretched, like multiple umbilical cords out
of its sides, through holes in the plastic up to wall-to-wall
piping above me, then on to that humming barrel. The head was held
immobile by curving metal pincers, blunt ends pressed against each
side of the skull.

The head was immobile, but
its eyes were not. That was the worst thing of all; seeing those
living, intelligent eyes, the only things that moved, except for
pulsing synapses in the brain, their amplitude and frequency being
traced by wavy lines on moving paper tape.

And then I saw the
tuft-like patches of whitish hairs, above those moving
eyes...distinctive chalky areas which had, in the beginning
reminded me of my own goofy eyebrows. I’d found Hank’s dog,
Rusty.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

Sadness was like a weight
pressing down on me, and the tightness in my stomach was almost
pain. But there wasn’t any doubt, none at all. I had indeed found
Rusty, or what was left of him.

This was, had been, Hank’s
dog, his part-mongrel German Shepherd, his “much-loved
human-animal.” It was the same handsome face I’d seen in the photo
Hank had given me, back in the beginning, a long time ago; I didn’t
even have to check it again. The same beige-brown shades, same long
smooth muzzle, same unmistakable whitish goofiness above the dark
brown eyes. Eyes that—horribly—continued to move.

I stepped to my right,
raised a hand. Those eyes moved, left, followed me, and
glittered—at least in the increasing craziness of my
imagination—like eyes of glass, like one of Hobart Belking’s
freeze-dried heads watching me with intelligence, with awareness,
perhaps even with fear.

Maybe the head was
“alive,” but Rusty wasn’t. He’d been dead for a long time, probably
since soon after Hank last saw him running down Mulberry Street and
around the corner at Elm, sprinting after a dark green
van.

I felt an unaccustomed
weakness, a strangeness in my legs, something almost like
dizziness. Something that was dizziness swirling in my head while
an inner trembling filled all my body.

Then I killed
Rusty.

Killed whatever it
was.

It took a long time to
die; at least, it seemed a very, very long time. But finally there
was a moment when the movement, the light, the life left Rusty’s
eyes.

And that was too much for
me. Whatever it was that had started to hit me earlier finished the
job. Everything around me was spinning; anger burned in my stomach,
rose into my throat.

I spun around and
headed—maybe for the door where I’d entered, maybe. I don’t know. I
just know, wherever it was, I didn’t get there, didn’t get out of
the room. I bumped into a table, heard shattering of glass, then
banged into a wall and bent over, retching, getting rid of almost
everything inside me except the sickness I wanted to be free of,
but knew I would never be free of.

No way. Not now.
Because... when I started to straighten up, rubbing one hand over
smelly thickness smearing my lips and chin, I was looking back
toward an area of the big laboratory ten or fifteen feet beyond
where I’d just been, and my gaze fell on other tables, plastic
white boxes, two more of those bright steel barrels, fine wires and
thin plastic tubing, and a couple of other things.

And, instantly I
understood what had happened to Guenther and Helga, knew where
they’d been and much of the why. Knew with my mind almost frozen,
numbed, unable to fully respond that I had finally found the
Vungers.

Or, again...what was left
of them.

Both human heads were
displayed as Rusty’s had been, atop shiny white boxes placed on
heavy tables, thin plastic tubing entering from beneath and fine
wires descending from directly above the exposed brains. Both heads
had been shaved and were obscenely hairless. Guenther was nearer
me, about fifteen feet away, Helga seven or eight feet behind him.
There was something strange and disturbing about the expression on
Guenther’s face—I couldn’t help thinking of the thing as Guenther,
but it wasn’t a real....

I squeezed my eyes shut,
feeling a kind of clammy darkness spreading in my own brain, not
quite able to believe I was looking at the severed heads of
Guenther and Helga Vunger, at a kind of living death one might
expect to see in hell but not on the gentle earth...looking at
people, or at least the faces and features of people, I had
immediately recognized. The Vunger’s and I hadn’t met, but in
shadowy grayness behind my closed lids I could see them both as
clearly as if we’d sat and chatted yesterday. I had seen only their
pictures, those two framed photographs upstairs in their home, but
I recalled them now with unnatural vividness. In their wedding
picture, she’d been a plump and pretty lady, he a stocky man
wearing a gray suit too tight for his body. That led me to wonder
where his body was, and if it was ashes and bits of bone
now.

I remembered thinking that
the Vungers, like many newlyweds, had seemed to be gazing dazedly
toward a bright and promising future, smiling hugely. Twenty years
later—wedding anniversary not long ago—those smiles had become less
toothy, but both Mr. and Mrs. had still been smiling. And I
remembered thinking they looked like very nice people.

I opened my eyes. I was
still disturbed by that strangely unreal expression of Guenther’s
face, and for a moment I thought it was because his eyes seemed to
be entirely, shiningly white, like the plastic below his severed
neck, or pieces of peeled hard-boiled egg. But then I took two
steps toward him—toward it, I still kept thinking of it as
Guenther—and understood.

My second step brought me
to within three or four feet of Guenther’s head, and only then did
his eyes move. They had been turned far to the left, as far as they
could be turned; he swung them swiftly right rolled them up to fix
them on my face staring intently, wildly, for long
seconds—frightening seconds, I have to admit—then pulled them left,
far left, again. His right eye seemed almost to be looking at the
bridge of his nose, left eye straining toward...something...on his
left.

Then I got it, then I
understood.

Guenther’s gaze was on the
glass face of a cabinet, the glass almost mirrorlike, reflecting an
area of the room behind Guenther. And in that reflected area atop a
white-plastic box on another large square table, unreal, toy-like,
resembling the waxy plastic face and shiny skull of a
department-store mannequin, was the head of Guenther’s
wife.

He stretched and strained
his eyes to see the glass, and in the glass the sliced-off
disembodied head, of Mrs. Vunger. Of Helga. How many times had he
said her name in the twenty years and more they’d lived together?
Was he saying it, thinking it now? Remembering the wildness of his
eyes fixed on my face, seeing them now rolled far left to stare at
glass and the reflected face, I could understand why he, why it, by
now must surely be mad. I stepped around Guenther, tried the door
of that cabinet. It wasn’t locked, and I opened the door part way
so Guenther wouldn’t be able to see a reflection of what I was
doing. Then I walked on back and checked the head of Helga
Vunger.

She was, unquestionably,
dead. Her head had even been “unplugged,” to state the fact
crudely. The dozen fine wires had been pulled from the brain and
dangled in the air a few inches above it, folded up and held
together with a common wire-and-paper strip like the “ties”
housewives use to close plastic sacks in their kitchens.

For a moment I looked at
that face, now not alive and not even dead but more like something
that could never have been alive or pretty or warm, a caricature
fashioned from doughy putty, with no synapses or electromagnetic
surges here to make pens wiggle wavy lines, no flow of electricity,
no singing of life—nothing being reported from this experiment
now.

Nothing reported since
yesterday, I guessed. Nothing since the moment, or not long after
the moment, when my dialogue with Dr. William Wintersong—right next
door, in the good doctor’s office—had so abruptly ended, when he’d
heard the same faint buzzing I’d heard, and began instantly to come
unglued. That must have been when Mrs. Vunger died, or started
dying... because obviously Wintersong hadn’t been able to “save”
her.

Right then another thought
struck me, really struck me. I wondered if Guenther, too, had heard
at that same time the same insistent buzzing...and, stretching his
eyes far left, understood what it meant, understood as he watched
what remained of his Helga, die. And I wondered if Guenther had
realized then that he must be looking at a reflection of himself,
of what he also had become, or more truly what Dr. Wintersong had
made of him. If he had, I couldn’t conceive of any realization more
shattering, more unbelievably horrible.

Well, I sure couldn’t ask
him; no way. There was still life, or something approximating life,
within that grisly head, still perception undoubtedly accompanied
by thought. I knew it could see, probably could hear, but certainly
couldn’t speak without lungs or breath. No way to communicate with
what little was left of Guenther, even though the key to all of
Guenther was undoubtedly inside that open skull. No way unless,
maybe, by some kind of eye-code, blinking and winking and
rolling—then, unbidden and out of the blue, for a curious and
almost crazy moment, I imagined myself as Guenther—or Helga—or
Rusty—coming slowly up out of drugged nothingness, fuzzy with dregs
of anesthesia, awakening after the monstrous thing had been
done.

How would I know what had
happened? Would I know? How could I...a head, something without a
body but with hearing and sight, with thought and perception and
emotion...know what had been done to me? I would be unable to see
my chest, arms, legs, and of course couldn’t feel them, but would
probably assume they were there.