Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

One of the men apparently had died of a wasting disease; he was emaciated. His narrow lips were pinched tight. One eye closed, the other open, he appeared to have lacked the courage to turn his full gaze on approaching Death.

The second man looked healthy; the cause of his death was not evident. He seemed to be alive, except that the polyurethane made him glisten head to foot like a well-basted holiday turkey.

Evidently the middle-aged woman had died soon after a single mastectomy, because the lurid scars had not yet healed before she passed. As was true also of the men, her head had been shaved.

Her blue eyes fixed Ryan with a look of mortification and horror, as though she were aware of the atrocities to which she had been subjected after death.

When he could speak, Ryan asked: “The authorities know he has these?”

“Each…person in the collection either signed over his body to Barghest before death-or the family did so. He’s displayed them at various events.”

“Health hazard?”

“The experts say no, none.”

“Certainly isn’t good for anyone’s mental health.”

“It’s all been adjudicated. Courts believe it’s legitimate art, a political statement, cultural anthropology, educational, hip, cool, fun.”

Squeamish not because he stood in the company of the dead but because he felt that their exploitation was an affront to human dignity, Ryan looked away from the three specimens.

“When do we start feeding Christians to the lions?” he wondered.

“Tickets go on sale next Wednesday.”

She returned to the foyer to allow him to tour the house alone.

A hallway led off the living room, and a fourth glistening cadaver stood at the end, bathed in light from an art spot.

This man must have perished in an accident or possibly as the consequence of a brutal beating. The left eye was swollen shut in his battered face, and the right was red with blood. A cheekbone had been crushed. The frontal bone of his skull had fractured into two plates, and one had slightly dislocated from the other.

Ryan wondered if the brain remained in the skull or if it had been removed. Likewise, the internal organs. He didn’t know every step taken in the preservation process.

Already, he had begun to adjust to this barbaric “art,” finding it no less offensive than before, but nevertheless letting curiosity and a kind of dark wonder armor him against pity and outrage.

He told himself that his response to these abominations was not apathy, not even indifference, but necessary stoicism. If he did not repress his sympathy for these men and women and his disgust at what had been done to their remains, he would not be able to continue with the necessary search that he had come here to conduct.

In the bedroom, an armature supported a dead woman in a seated position. Her suggestive posture and the intensity of her dead stare so disturbed Ryan that he made only the most cursory inspection of the room and the adjacent closet.

Barghest’s home office contained the sole significant discovery related to Ryan’s personal situation.

On a bookshelf, among more ordinary volumes, were two ring binders of high-quality eight-by-ten color photographs. Faces.

Every face was expressionless, and not a single pair of eyes regarded the camera or appeared to be focused on anything. These were the faces of dead people.

A clear-plastic sleeve protected each photo. Affixed to each sleeve, a small label offered what might have been a file number neatly printed by hand.

Ryan assumed that these people had requested Barghest-or their families had requested him-to assist their departure from this world by suicide or, in the case of the mentally incapacitated, by the administration of some lethal but untraceable substance.

The absence of names and dates of death suggested that Barghest thought the photographs might be incriminating in spite of society’s current tolerance for the kind of compassion that he so enjoyed administering.

Relieved that the room lacked an observing cadaver, Ryan sat at the desk with both ring binders. He did not know why he should force himself to study so many faces of corpses, but intuition suggested that this ordeal would reward him.

Barghest’s trophies were of both sexes, young and old, and of all races. The word trophies surprised Ryan when it occurred to him, but after a dozen faces, no other term seemed as accurate.

In some instances, the subjects’ eyes appeared to have frozen open at the moment of death. Sometimes, however, small pieces of Scotch tape fixed the eyelids to the brows.

Ryan tried not to consider why open eyes were so important to Barghest. In a moment of uncanny perception, however, he knew the euthanasia activist savored each dead gaze with the insistence of a rapist compelling his victim to meet his stare, that every photo had a quasi-pornographic purpose.

The album suddenly felt greasy, and he put it down.

He rolled the office chair back from the desk, leaned forward, and hung his head. Breathing through his mouth, he struggled to quell a rush of nausea.

His heart did not race, but each beat felt like a wave, a great swell breaking in his chest. The floor seemed to rise and fall, as if he were afloat, and a thin scree sounded like gulls crying in the distance, although he realized that he was listening to the faint whistle of his pinched breathing.

The internal waves rose in sets, in the way that real waves formed upon the sea, some larger than others, with pauses between. He knew that strokes of uneven force and the loss of rhythm could be a prelude to cardiac arrest.

He placed one hand on his chest, as though he could press calm upon his heart.

If Ryan died in this place, Wilson Mott’s agents might leave his body behind rather than risk explaining why he and they had been here. Found by Dr. Death, he might wind up as one more exhibit in the gallery of cadavers. Stripped naked, preserved, and glazed after being bent into a humiliating posture, he would ornament a currently vacant corner of the house, thereafter subject to Spencer Barghest’s attention and unholy touch.

Whether by an act of sheer will or by the grace of Fate, Ryan survived the episode and, after a couple of minutes, felt his heart reestablish rhythmic beats and measured force.

The dry, cool air in Barghest’s house was odorless but had a faint metallic taste. Counseling himself not to contemplate the source of that flavor, Ryan stopped breathing through his mouth.

He sat up straight in the office chair and rolled it to the desk once more. After a hesitation, he opened the first ring binder to the photograph that he’d been studying when nausea had overcome him.

Still operating on a hunch, he paged with grim determination through the first book of photos. His patience was at last rewarded when he saw the third face in the second binder.

Samantha. Her eyes were taped open, her full lips slightly parted, as if she had let out a sigh of satisfaction as the shutter of the camera caught her.

This was not Samantha, of course, but Teresa, her identical twin. Prior to death, she lingered in a vegetative state, abed for months following the auto accident, and the experience diminished her beauty. So pale, Teresa nevertheless remained lovely, and in fact her suffering gave her the ethereal radiance, the fragile otherworldly beauty of a martyr ascending to sainthood in an old-master painting.

Evidently, Barghest had known Rebecca six years ago. He must have been present at Teresa’s death.

By her own account, Samantha also had been at her sister’s bedside during those final hours. Yet she never mentioned Barghest.

She rarely spoke of her lost twin. But that was understandable and in no way suspicious. Surely the loss still hurt.