Before he descended half the distance to the lower chamber, he detected the odor of death. It rose to him on currents of cool dry air. The stench excited him. No perfume, regardless of how exquisite, even if applied to the tender throat of a lovely woman, could ever thrill him as profoundly as the singular, sweet fragrance of corrupted flesh.
5
Under the halogen lamps, the stainless-steel and white-enameled surfaces of the operating room were a little hard on the eyes, like the geometric configurations of an arctic landscape polished by the glare of a winter sun. The room seemed to have gotten chillier, as if the heat flowing into the dead man was pushing the cold out of him, thereby lowering the air temperature. Jonas Nyebern shivered.
Helga checked the digital thermometer that was patched to Harrison. “Body temperature's up to seventy degrees.”
“Seventy-two minutes,” Gina said.
“We're going for the brass ring now,” Ken said. “Medical history, the Guinness Book of World Records, TV appearances, books, movies, T-shirts with our faces on 'em, novelty hats, plastic lawn ornaments in our images.”
“Some dogs have been brought back after ninety minutes,” Kari reminded him.
“Yeah,” Ken said, “but they were dogs. Besides, they were so screwed up, they chased bones and buried cars.”
Gina and Kari laughed softly, and the joke seemed to break the tension for everyone except Jonas. He could never relax for a moment in the process of a resuscitation, although he knew that it was possible for a physician to get so tightly wound that he was no longer performing at his peak. Ken's ability to vent a little nervous energy was admirable, and in the service of the patient; however, Jonas was incapable of doing likewise in the midst of a battle.
“Seventy-two degrees, seventy-three.”
It was a battle. Death was the adversary: clever, mighty, and relentless. To Jonas, death was not just a pathological state, not merely the inevitable fate of all living things, but actually an entity that walked the world, perhaps not always the robed figure of myth with its skeletal face hidden in the shadows of a cowl, but a very real presence nonetheless, Death with a capital D.
“Seventy-four degrees,” Helga said.
Gina said, “Seventy-three minutes.”
Jonas introduced more free-radical scavengers into the blood that surged through the IV line.
He supposed that his belief in Death as a supernatural force with a will and consciousness of its own, his certainty that it sometimes walked the earth in an embodied form, his awareness of its presence right now in this room in a cloak of invisibility, would seem like silly superstition to his colleagues. It might even be regarded as a sign of mental imbalance or incipient madness. But Jonas was confident of his sanity. After all, his belief in Death was based on empirical evidence. He had seen the hated enemy when he was only seven years old, had heard it speak, had looked into its eyes and smelled its fetid breath and felt its icy touch upon his face.
“Seventy-five degrees.”
“Get ready,” Jonas said.
The patient's body temperature was nearing a threshold beyond which reanimation might begin at any moment. Kari finished filling a hypodermic syringe with epinephrine, and Ken activated the defibrillation machine to let it build up a charge. Gina opened the flow valve on a tank containing an oxygen-carbon dioxide mixture that had been formulated to the special considerations of resuscitation procedures, and picked up the mask of the pulmonary machine to make sure it was functioning.
“Seventy-six degrees,” Helga said, “seventy-seven.”
Gina checked her watch. “Coming up on … seventy-four minutes.”
6
At the bottom of the long incline, he entered a cavernous room as large as an airplane hangar. Hell had once been re-created there, according to the unimaginative vision of an amusement-park designer, complete with gas-jet fires lapping at formed-concrete rocks around the perimeter.
The gas had been turned off long ago. Hell was tar-black now. But not to him, of course.
He moved slowly across the concrete floor, which was bisected by a serpentine channel housing another chain-drive. There, the gondolas had moved through a lake of water made to look like a lake of fire by clever lighting and bubbling air hoses that simulated boiling oil. As he walked, he savored the stench of decay, which grew more exquisitely pungent by the second.
A dozen mechanical demons had once stood on higher formations, spreading immense bat wings, peering down with glowing eyes that periodically raked the passing gondolas with harmless crimson laser beams. Eleven of the demons had been hauled away, peddled to some competing park or sold for scrap. For unknown reasons, one devil remained — a silent and unmoving agglomeration of rusted metal, moth-eaten fabric, torn plastic, and grease-caked hydraulic mechanisms. It was still perched on a rocky spire two-thirds of the way toward the high ceiling, pathetic rather than frightening.
As he passed beneath that sorry funhouse figure, he thought, I am the only real demon this place has ever known or ever will, and that pleased him.
Months ago he stopped thinking of himself by his Christian name. He adopted the name of a fiend that he had read about in a book on Satanism. Vassago. One of the three most powerful demon princes of Hell, who answered only to His Satanic Majesty. Vassago. He liked the sound of it. When he said it aloud, the name rolled from his tongue so easily that it seemed as if he'd never answered to anything else.
“Vassago.”
In the heavy subterranean silence, it echoed back to him from the concrete rocks: “Vassago. ”
7
“Eighty degrees.”
“It should be happening,” Ken said. Surveying the monitors, Kari said, “Flat lines, just flat lines.”
Her long, swanlike neck was so slender that Jonas could see her pulse pounding rapidly in her carotid artery.
He looked down at the dead man's neck. No pulse there.
“Seventy-five minutes,” Gina announced.
“If he comes around, it's officially a record now,” Ken said. “We'll be obligated to celebrate, get drunk, puke on our shoes, and make fools of ourselves.”
“Eighty-one degrees.”
Jonas was so frustrated that he could not speak — for fear of uttering an obscenity or a low, savage snarl of anger. They had made all the right moves, but they were losing. He hated losing. He hated Death. He hated the limitations of modern medicine, all circumscriptions of human knowledge, and his own inadequacies.
“Eighty-two degrees.”
Suddenly the dead man gasped.
Jonas twitched and looked at the monitors.
The EKG showed spastic movement in the patient's heart.
“Here we go,” Kari said.
8
The robotic figures of the damned, more than a hundred in Hell's heyday, were gone with eleven of the twelve demons; gone, as well, were the wails of agony and the lamentations that had been broadcast through their speaker-grille mouths. The desolate chamber, however, was not without lost souls. But now it housed something more appropriate than robots, more like the real thing: Vassago's collection.
At the center of the room, Satan waited in all his majesty, fierce and colossal. A circular pit in the floor, sixteen to eighteen feet in diameter, housed a massive statue of the Prince of Darkness himself. He was not shown from the waist down; but from his navel to the tips of his segmented horns, he measured thirty feet. When the funhouse had been in operation, the monstrous sculpture waited in a thirty-five-foot pit, hidden beneath the lake, then periodically surged up out of its lair, water cascading from it, huge eyes afire, monstrous jaws working, sharp teeth gnashing, forked tongue flickering, thundering a warning—“Abandon hope all ye who enter here!”—and then laughing malevolently.