Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 15

On the glassed-in porch, planter baskets hung from the ceiling. In the gloom, the ferns cascading from the baskets seemed to be giant spiders perpetually poised to strike.

Not afraid of the troll but not content to sit in the dark with him, either, Erika lit a candle in a faceted red cup. The geometrics of the glass translated the mercurial flame into luminous polygons that shimmered on the troll’s face, which might have been a cubist portrait of Poe’s Red Death if the Red Death in the story had been a funny-looking dwarfish guy with a knobby chin, a lipless slit for a mouth, warty skin, and huge, expressive, beautiful — and eerie — eyes.

As Victor’s wife, Erika was expected to be witty and well-spoken when she was a hostess at events in this house and when she was a guest, with her husband, at other social occasions. Therefore, she had been programmed with an encyclopedia of literary allusions that she could draw upon effortlessly, though she had never read any of the books to which the allusions referred.

In fact, she was strictly forbidden to read books. Erika Four, her predecessor, had spent a lot of time in Victor’s well-stocked library, perhaps with the intention of improving herself and being a better wife. But books corrupted her, and she was put down like a diseased horse.

Books were dangerous. Books were the most dangerous things in the world, at least for any wife of Victor Helios. Erika Five did not know why this should be true, but she understood that if she began to read books, she would be cruelly punished and perhaps terminated.

For a while, from across the table, she and the troll regarded each other with interest, as she drank her cognac and he drank the Far Niente Chardonnay that she had given him. For good reason, she said nothing, and he seemed to understand and to have sympathy for the position in which his few words, spoken earlier, had put her.

When he first came to the window and pressed his forehead to the glass, gazing in at her on the porch, before Erika packed a picnic hamper for him, the troll had said, “Harker.”

Pointing to herself, she had said, “Erika.”

His smile, then, had been an ugly wound. No doubt it would be no less hideous if he smiled again, for he possessed a face that familiarity did not improve.

As tolerant of his unfortunate appearance as a good hostess should be, Erika had continued to stare through the window at him until in his raspy voice he had said, “Hate him.”

Neither of them had spoken again on the troll’s first visit. And for the time being, silence served them well on this second tęte-ŕ-tęte.

She dared not ask whom he hated, for if he answered with the name of her master, she would be required, by her program, either to restrain and detain him or to warn the appropriate people of the danger that he posed.

Her failure to betray the troll immediately might earn her a beating. On the other hand, if she reported him at once, she might nevertheless be beaten anyway. In this game, the rules were not clear; besides, all the rules applied to her, none to her husband.

At this hour, all of the household staff were in the dormitory at the back of the estate, most likely engaged in the intense and often brutal sexual activity that was the only release from tension allowed their kind.

Victor liked his privacy at night. She suspected that he needed little if any sleep, but she didn’t know what he did when alone that made privacy so important to him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

The busy rush of rain on the roof and beyond the windows made the silence of the porch, by comparison, intimate, even cozy.

“My hearing is very good,” she said. “If I hear someone coming, I will blow out the candle, and you will at once slip out the door.”

The troll nodded agreement.

Harker …

Because Erika Five had arisen from her creation tank less than twenty-four hours earlier, she was up-to-date on her husband’s life and accomplishments. The events of his day were regularly downloaded directly to the brain of a wife in development, that she might be born fully understanding both his greatness and the frustrations that an imperfect world visited upon a man of his singular genius.

Erika, like other key Alphas, also knew the names of all the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, and Epsilons produced in the Hands of Mercy, as well as what work they performed for their creator. Consequently, the name Harker was familiar to her.

Until a few days before, when something went wrong with him, an Alpha named Jonathan Harker had been a homicide detective with the New Orleans Police Department. In a confrontation with two detectives who were members of the Old Race — O’Connor and Maddison — the renegade Harker was supposedly killed by shotgun fire and by a plunge off a warehouse roof.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

Just during the past day, between his two beatings of Erika, Victor performed an autopsy on Harker and discovered that the Alpha’s torso was largely missing. The flesh, internal organs, and some bone structure seemed to have been eaten away. Fifty or more pounds of the Alpha’s mass had disappeared. From the carcass trailed a severed umbilical cord, suggesting that an unintended life form had developed inside Harker, fed upon him, and separated from its host following the fall from the roof.

Now Erika sipped her cognac. The troll sipped his wine.

Resorting to a literary allusion that she felt appropriate, though she would never fully understand the reference if she never read the dangerous book by Joseph Conrad, Erika said, “Sometimes I wonder if I’m Marlow, far upriver with Kurtz, and ahead of us — and behind us — lies only the heart of an immense darkness.”

The troll’s lipless mouth produced an approximation of a lip-smacking sound.

“You grew inside Harker?” she asked.

The cut-glass container marshaled the light of the amorphous flame into square, rectangular, and triangular tiles that presented the troll’s face as a shimmering red mosaic. “Yes,” he rasped. “I am from what I was.”

“Harker is dead?”

“He who was is dead, but I am who was.”

“You are Jonathan Harker?”

“Yes.”

“Not just a creature who grew in him like a cancer?”

“No.”

“Did he realize you were growing in him?”

“He who was knew of I who am.”

From the tens of thousands of literary allusions through which Erika could scan in an instant, she knew that, in fairy tales, when trolls or manikins or other such beings spoke in either riddles or in a convoluted manner, they were trouble. Nevertheless, she felt a kinship with this creature, and she trusted him.

She said, “May I call you Jonathan?”

“No. Call me Johnny. No. Call me John-John. No. Not that.”

“What shall I call you?”

“You will know my name when my name is known to me.”

“You have all of Jonathan’s memories and knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“Was the change you underwent uncontrolled or intentional?”

The troll smacked the flaps of his mouth together. “He who was thought it was happening to him. I who am realize he made it happen.”

“Unconsciously, you desperately wanted to become someone other than Jonathan Harker.”

“The Jonathan who was … he wanted to be like himself but become other than an Alpha.”

“He wanted to remain a man but be free of his maker’s control,” Erika interpreted.

“Yes.”

“Instead,” she said, “you shed the Alpha body and became … what you are now.”

The troll shrugged. “Shit happens.”