Jonas depressed the plungers halfway on each of the three syringes,
introducing heavy doses of the free-radical scavengers into the first
blood passing through the line. He waited less than a minute, then
swiftly depressed the plungers all the way.
Helga had already prepared three more syringes according to his
instructions. He removed the depleted ones from the IV ports and
introduced the full syringes without injecting any of their contents.
Ken had moved the portable defibrillation machine next to the patient.
Subsequent to reanimation, if Harrison's heart began to beat erratically
or chaotically fibrillation it might be coerced into a normal rhythm by
the application of an electric shock. That was a last-hope strategy,
however, for violent defibrillation could also have a serious adverse
effect on a patient who, having been recently brought back from the
dead, was in an exceptionally fragile state.
Consulting the digital thermometer, Kari said, "His body temperature's
up to only fifty-six degrees."
"Sixty-seven minutes," Gina said.
"Too slow," Jonas said.
"External heat?"
Jonas hesitated.
"Let's go for it," Ken advised.
"Fifty-seven degrees," Kari said.
"At this rate," Helga said worriedly, "we're going to be past eighty
minutes before he's anywhere near warm enough for the heart to kick in."
Heating pads had been placed under the operating-table sheet before the
patient had been brought into the room. They extended the length of his
spine.
"Okay," Jonas said.
Kari clicked the switch on the heating pads.
"But easy," Jonas adv1.
Kari adjusted the temperature controls.
They had to warm the body, but potential problems could arise from a
too-rapid reheating. Every resuscitation was a tightrope walk.
Large doses of vitamins E and C, tirilazad mesylate, and phenyl tertiary
butyl nitrone.
The patient was motionless, pale. He reminded Jonas of a figure in a
life-size tableau in some old cathedral: the supine body of Christ
sculpted from white marble, rendered by the artist in the position of
entombment as He would have rested just prior to the most successful
resurrection of all time.
Because Kari Dovell had peeled back Harrison's eyelids for the
ophthalmoscopic examination, his eyes were open, staring sightlessly at
the ceiling, and Gina was putting artificial tears in them with a
dropper to insure that the lenses did not dry out. She hummed "Little
Surfer Girl" as she worked. She was a Beach Boys fan.
No shock or fear was visible in the cadaver's eyes, as one might have
expected. Instead, they held an expression that was almost peaceful,
almost touched by wonder. Harrison looked as if he had seen something,
in the moment of death, to lilt his heart.
Finishing with the eyedrops, Gina checked her watch. "Sixty-eight
minutes."
Jonas had the crazy urge to tell her to shut up, as though time would
halt as long as she was not calling it out, minute by minute.
Blood pumped in and out of the bypass machine.
"Sixty-two degrees." Helga spoke so sternly that she might have been
chastising the dead man for the laggardly pace of his reheating.
Flat lines on the EKG.
Flat lines on the EEG.
"Come on," Jonas urged. "Come on, come on."
4
He entered the museum of the dead not through one of its upper doors but
through the waterless lagoon. In that shallow depression, three
gondolas still lay on the cracked concrete. They were ten-passenger
models that had long ago been tipped off the heavy chain--drive track
along which they'd once carried their happy passengers. Even at night,
wearing sunglasses, he could see they did not have the swan-neck prows
of real gondolas in Venice, but sported leering gargoyles as
figureheads, hand-carved from wood, garishly painted, perhaps fearsome
at one time but now cracked, didn't need them in that gloom.
Neither did he require a flashlight. Where an ordinary man would have
been blind, he could see.
The concrete sluiceway, along which the gondolas had once moved, was
three feet deep and eight feet wide. A much narrower channel in the
sluiceway floor contained the rusted chain-drive mechanisms long series
of blunt, curved, six-inch-high hooks that had pulled the boats forward
by engaging the steel loops on the bottoms of their hulls.
When the ride had been in operation, those hooks had been concealed by
water, contributing to the illusion that the gondolas were actually
adrift. Now, dwindling into the dreary realm ahead, they looked like a
row of stubby spines on the back of an immense prehistoric reptile.
The world of the living, he thought, is always fraught with deception.
Beneath the placid surface, ugly mechanisms grind away at secret tasks.
He walked deeper into the building. The gradual downward slope of the
sluiceway was at first barely perceptible, but he was aware of it
because he had passed that way many times before.
Above him, to either side of the channel, were concrete service walks,
about four feet wide. Beyond them were the tunnel walls, which had been
painted black to serve as a non-reflective backdrop for the moments of
half-baked theater performed in front of them.
The walkways widened occasionally to form niches, in some places even
whole rooms. When the ride had been in operation, the niches had been
filled with tableaus meant to amuse or horrify or both: ghosts and
goblins, ghouls and monsters, ax-wielding madmen standing over the
prostrate bodies of their beheaded victims. In one of the room-sized
areas, there had been an elaborate graveyard filled with stalking
zombies; in another, a large and convincing flying saucer had disgorged
blood-thirsty aliens with a shark's profusion of teeth in their huge
heads. The robotic figures had moved, grimaced, reared up, and
threatened all passersby with tape-recorded voices, eternally repeating
the same brief programmed dramas with the same menacing words and
snarls.
No, not eternally. They were gone now, carted away by the official
salvagers, by agents of the creditors, or by scavengers.
Nothing was eternal.
Except death.
A hundred feet beyond the entrance doors, he reached the end of the
first section of the chain-drive. The tunnel floor, which had been
sloping imperceptibly, now tilted down sharply, at about a
thirty-five-degree angle, falling away into flawless blackness. Here,
the gondolas had slipped free of the blunt hooks in the channel floor
and, with a stomach-wrenching lurch, sailed down a
hundred-and-fifty-foot incline, falling into the pool below with a
colossal splash that drenched the passengers up front, much to the
delight of those fortunate or smart enough to get a seat in the back.
Because he was not like ordinary men and possessed certain special
powers, he could see part of the way down the incline, even in that
utterly lightless environment, although hi
s perception did not extend to
the very bottom. His catlike night vision was limited: within a radius
of ten or fifteen feet, he could see as clearly as if he stood in
daylight; thereafter, objects grew blurry, steadily less distinct,
shadowy, until darkness swallowed everything at a distance of perhaps
forty or fifty feet.
Leaning backward to retain his balance on the steep slope, he headed
down into the bowels of the abandoned funhouse. He was not afraid of
what might wait below. Nothing could frighten him any more. After all,
he was deadlier and more savage than anything with which this world
could threaten him.
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
Guiness 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 epineplrrine, 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 related 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 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, swan-like neck was 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 ou
r shoes, and make fools of
ourselves."
"Eightyne 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
Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway Page 7