This time she couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.
“Things look very good right now,” Gordy Farber told her. “He’s stable, and the next day or so will tell the tale. If there are no further incidents, I think his prognosis for a full recovery is excellent.”
“And if there is another … incident?” Anne asked.
Gordy Farber spread his fingers noncommittally. “We’ll cross that bridge if and when we come to it. For now, the important thing is that he’s doing very well, given what happened to him, and in spite of how he looks, he’s already a whole lot better than he was when they brought him in this morning.” He stood up, handing her a pamphlet he’d produced from the pocket of his white coat. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you read this while I go check on my patients. As soon as I finish my rounds, I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have.”
Anne took the pamphlet, her eyes focusing only on the two major words in its title: Heart Attack. Nodding mutely, she sank back against the harsh material of the small sofa. She sat silently holding the pamphlet for a few minutes, trying to adjust herself to the fact of Glen’s heart attack. Only two days ago — only this morning, really — he’d been so strong, so healthy, so … alive.
And today he’d nearly died.
Once again she thought of him lying in the hospital bed, his face ashen, his body connected to the monitors, looking weak and helpless. What if he didn’t get better? What if he had another — what was it Dr. Farber had called it?
Incident.
But it wasn’t any mere “incident”; it was a myocardial infarction — a heart attack — and another one would undoubtedly kill him.
What would she do if that happened? How would she cope with it? A terrible wave of loneliness and despair washed over her. She was afraid she might cry again, but steeled herself against it. Falling apart was the last thing she needed right now.
She opened the pamphlet, but the words made no sense to her. For right now, she couldn’t deal with it. Right now she had to do something else, something that would take her mind off Glen, if only for a few minutes.
It was only then that she remembered the man who had not survived this terrible day. Richard Kraven.
The man she had watched die in the electric chair only hours earlier. And about whom she should already have written and filed a story. Grasping at work as a way to keep the terrible fear of losing Glen at bay, Anne Jeffers concentrated on constructing a story in her head.
A story of death, but at least not of Glen’s death.
By the time Gordy Farber returned to the waiting room, Anne had not only composed the story in her mind, but called the paper and dictated it into her voice mailbox.
Now, the story filed, she turned her attention back to her husband and listened calmly as the doctor told her what she could expect.
As she listened, her resolve took hold: she would deal with it.
No matter what it took, Glen would not die.
She wouldn’t let him.
CHAPTER 10
The Experimenter lay in near darkness, the walls of his room only faintly illuminated by the pale glow of the streetlamps outside. Though he lay still, he was not asleep, although he knew that soon he would have to sleep.
But not yet. Right now, he wanted to hear the report just one more time.
His fingers stroked the smooth plastic of the remote control, and he could almost imagine that the satiny texture was that of skin.
The skin of one of his subjects.
So long.
It had been so long since he’d dared let himself even think about conducting another experiment, but now it would be safe again.
Safe, at least for a while.
His forefinger pressed gently on one of the control buttons, and the volume on the television rose just enough so he could hear the anchorman’s voice:
“Topping our stories today, Richard Kraven was executed yesterday at noon, Eastern Daylight Time, dying in the electric chair only hours after his final appeals for a new trial were denied. According to Seattle Herald reporter Anne Jeffers, the last person to talk with Kraven before he died, he expressed no remorse for what he’d done, even at the eleventh hour, continuing to proclaim his innocence despite the massive evidence presented in his trial.…”
The Experimenter, lying in the darkness, could barely suppress a gloating chuckle, and fleetingly wished there were someone he could share the joke with. Still, it wouldn’t be long before the whole world understood his joke.
How long had it been since he had carried out the last experiment?
So long ago he had almost forgotten how it felt to see the look in his subjects’ eyes when they began to feel sleepy and he assured them that they mustn’t worry, that all was going to be well.
He could remember more clearly the keening whine of the saw as it cut through their sterna, and his fingers moved reflexively as he recalled the warm pleasure of sinking his hands deep within the thoracic cavity, slipping them between the two warm masses of the lungs, closing them around the strongly beating hearts.…
The Experimenter uttered an all but inaudible groan of remembered pleasure.
Now he could begin again.
Now he would prove to them that they’d executed the wrong man.
For more than two long years — ever since they’d finally made their arrest, finally acted on all the evidence he’d let pile up — he’d been waiting for this day.
This day, and the ones to come when he would begin his experiments anew, expanding his knowledge, exercising his power, proving to the mindless fools who had executed Richard Kraven that they’d made a mistake, that they had been wrong. Not for the first time, the Experimenter wished he could play the fly on the wall and watch their expressions as they examined his newest subjects.
They would recognize his work immediately — of that there was no question whatsoever. But there was also no question whatsoever that they would deny the truth. Instead they would search for inconsistencies, search for differences in technique, no matter how slight, search for anything that would allow them to keep their pride — and their reputations — intact.
It would be worst for Anne Jeffers, for she would not only be forced to retract everything she’d ever said about Richard Kraven, she would have to take the responsibility for his execution as well.
She’d hounded Kraven, hounded him to his execution, though neither she nor anyone else had ever heard him confess.
Now he would pursue Anne Jeffers. He would toy with her for a while, let her think perhaps she’d been right all along.
Then he would plant the seeds of doubt in her mind, and in the end, after she knew the precise truth of what had happened, he would add her to his list, making her his final subject.
His fingers caressed the satiny texture of the remote control, and there was a soft click as the television screen went blank, the picture contracting into a tiny white dot in the center of the black screen, only to die away completely a moment later.
Die away as his subjects had died away.
But their deaths had not been in vain, for out of those deaths — no, not deaths, but merely failed experiments — had come knowledge. The Experimenter had long ago decided that knowledge was far more important even than life itself. Where Socrates had once observed that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, the man in the darkened room knew better: for him, it was the examination of the very phenomenon of life that made his existence possible. Indeed, as he’d thought about it during the long hiatus during which the authorities — those pitiably small minds who were far too simple to understand his work — built their case against Richard Kraven, the Experimenter had come to understand that even the subjects who’d died during his investigations could not truly be considered failures. After all, even in their deaths they’d contributed to the body of knowledge he had been building as painstakingly as the authorities had been building their case against Richard Kraven.