Eucharist. Just as their god was said to live within that thin wafer of
unleavened bread, so the face of Vassago’s unforgiving god could be seen
everywhere in the patterns of decay and dissolution.
The first body at the base of the thirty-foot Satan was that of Jenny
Purcell, a twenty-two-year-old waitress who had worked the evening shift
in a recreation of a 1950s diner, where the jukebox played Elvis Presley
and Chuck Berry, Lloyd Price and the Platters, Buddy Holly and Connie
Francis and the Everly Brothers. When Vassago had gone in for a burger
and a beer, Jenny thought he looked cool in his black clothes, wearing
sunglasses indoors at night and making no move to take them off. With
his baby-faced good looks given interest by a contrastingly firm set to
his jaw and a slight cruel twist to his mouth, and with thick black hair
falling across his forehead, he looked a little like a young Elvis.
What’s your name, she asked, and he said, Vassago, and she said, What’s
your first name, so he said, That’s it, the whole thing, first and last,
which must have intrigued her, got her imagination going, because she
said, What, you mean like Cher only has one name or Madonna or Sting? He
stared hard at her from behind his heavily tinted sunglasses and said,
Yeah-you have a problem with that?
She didn’t have a problem. In fact she was attracted to him. She said
he was “different,” but only later did she discover just how different
he really was.
Everything about Jenny marked her as a slut in his eyes, so after
killing her with an eight-inch stiletto that he drove under her rib cage
and into her heart, he arranged her in a posture suitable for a sexually
profligate woman. Once he had stripped her naked, he braced her in a
sitting position with her thighs spread wide and knees drawn up. He
bound her slender wrists to her shins to keep her upright.
Then he used strong lengths of cord to pull her head forward and down
farther than she could have managed to do while alive, brutally
compressing her midriff; he anchored the cords around her thighs, so she
was left eternally looking up the cleft between her legs, contemplating
her sins.
Jenny had been the first piece in his collection. Dead for about nine
months, trussed up like a ham in a curing barn, she was withered now, a
Indeed, in her peculiar posture, having contracted into a ball as she
had dyed and dried out, she resembled a human being so little that it
was difficult to think of her as ever having been a living person,
therefore usually difficult to think of her as a dead person.
Consequently, death Bed no longer to reside in her remrins. To Vassago,
she had ceased to be a corpse and had become merely a curious object, an
impersonal thing that might always have been inanimate. As a result,
although she was a part of his collection, she was now of minimal
interest to him.
He was fascinated solely with death and the dead. The living were of
interest to him only insofar as they carried the ripe promise of death
within them.
The patient’s heart oscillated between mild and severe tachycardia, from
a hundred and twenty to over two hundred and thirty beats per minute, a
transient condition resulting from the epinephrine and hypothermia
Except it wasn’t acting like a transient condition. Each time the pulse
rate declined, it did not subside as far as it had previously, and with
each new acceleration, the EKG showed escalating arrhythmia that could
lead only to cardiac arrest.
No longer sweating, calmer now that the decision to fight Death had been
made and was being acted upon, Jonas said, “Better hit him with it.”
No one doubted to whom he was speaking, and Ken Nakamura pressed the
cold pads of the defribulation machine to Harrison’s chest, bracketing
his heart. The electrical discharge caused the patient to bounce
violently against the table, and a sound like an iron mallet striking a
leather sofawhom!-slammed through the room.
Jonas looked at the electrocardiograph just as Kari read the meaning of