Of the remaining six female specimens in his collection, two had been
housewives, one a young attorney, one a medical secretary, and two
college students. Though he had arranged each corpse in a manner
fitting the personality, spirit, and weaknesses of the person who had
once inhabited it, and though he had considerable talent for cadaver
art, making especially clever use of a variety of props, he was far more
pleased by the effect he had achieved with one of the students than with
all of the others combined.
He stopped walking when he reached her.
He regarded her in the darkness, pleased by his work.
Margaret…
He first saw her during one of his restless late-night rambles, in a
dimly lighted bar near the university campus, where she was sipping diet
cola, either because she was not old enough to be served beer along with
her friends or because she was not a drinker. He suspected the latter.
She looked singularly wholesome and uncomfortable in the smoke and din
of the tavern. Even from halfway across the room, judging by her
reactions to her friends and her body language, Vassago could see that
she was a shy girl struggling hard to fit in with the crowd, even though
in her heart she knew that she would never entirely belong. The roar of
liquor-amplified conversation, the clink and clatter of glasses, the
thunderous jukebox music of Madonna and Michael Jackson and Michael
Bolton, the stink of cigarettes and stale beer, the moist heat of
college boys on the make-none of that touched her. She sat in the bar
but existed apart from it, unstained by it, filled with more secret
energy than that entire roomful of young men and women combined.
She was so vital, she seemed to glow. Vassago found it hard to believe
that the ordinary, sluggish blood of humanity moved through her veins.
Surely, instead, her heart pumped the distilled essence of life itself.
Her vitality drew him. It would be enormously satisfying to snuff such
a brightly burning flame of life.
To learn where she lived, he followed her home from the bar. For the
next two days, he stalked the campus, gathering information about her as
diligently as a real student might have researched a term paper.
Her name was Margaret Ann Campion. She was a senior, twenty years old,
majoring in music. She could play the piano, flute, clarinet, guitar,
and almost any other instrument she took a fancy to learn. Perhaps the
best-known and most-admired student in the music program, she was also
widely considered to possess an exceptional talent for composition. An
essentially shy person, she made a point of forcing herself out of her
shell, so music was not her only interest. She was on the track team,
the second fastest woman in their lineup, a spirited competitor; she
wrote about music and movies for the student paper; and she was active
in the Baptist church.
Her astonishing vitality was evident not merely in the joy with which
she wrote and played music, not just in the almost spiritual aura that
Vassago had seen in the bar, but also in her physical appearance. She
was incomparably beautiful, with the body of a silver-screen sex goddess
and the face of a saint. Clear skin. Perfect cheekbones.
Full lips, a generous mouth, a beatific smile. Limpid blue eyes. She
dressed modestly in an attempt to conceal the sweet fullness of her
breasts, the contrasting narrowness of her waist, the firmness of her
buttocks, and the long supple lines of her legs.
But he was certain that when he stripped her, she would be revealed for
what he had known her to be when he had first glimpsed her: a prodigious
breeder, a hot furnace of life in which eventually other life of
unparalleled brightness would be conceived and shaped.
He wanted her dead.
He wanted to stop her heart and then hold her for hours, feeling the
heat of life radiate out of her, until she was cold.
This one murder, it seemed to him, might at last earn him passage out of
the borderland in which he lived and into the land of the dead and