16

The morning's events had been a slow montage of daydreaming. Riestermann had called off the scheduled experiments because of some minor technical problems, and Shtolz had spent the day idly, his thoughts often returning to the object of his lust. He was almost ready to make the break. Their escape route was mapped out, and it had become a matter of biding his time until the vagaries of fate favored the logistics.

He'd been concentrating on the young sex slave he'd constructed inside the dark hollows of his imagination. Marta as she would look in three years, and Marta as she might appear in womanhood. He visualized the beginning roundness of her breasts as they might look when they began to blossom. He thought about the nipples, as yet undeveloped buds, how they might take on shape. The way in which they might change texturally in his devoted hands, under his particular tutelary influence.

The fantasy simmered as he went about routine chores. Clean-up work around the office and in the lab annex. He thought about ways he might discipline the girl. He hardened at the thought of how certain implements of the surgical trade might be employed. The word forceps came and perched on the tongue of his imagination, tasting of salty blood and hot jism. He tasted the edges of his thoughts, biting into another twisted daydream.

As he did so, Dr. Emil Shtolz chanced upon a stack of three fresh cadavers. The fruits of Uncle Hans's morning? He wondered if his mentor had worked in the O.R. after all. Oh, well. He would clean up after his colleague. Wouldn't be the first time. He would roll each corpse onto...

He recognized the body subconsciously at first, the look of the bony, mutilated cadaver in the lab morgue tagged “Human remains: Host Subject No. 3,” bearing Riestermann's loopy, hand-scrawled addendum.

The horror of it smashed him like a wall, burying him in the dirty rubble of shock. It was a pounding, merciless wave of hard data that his mind tried first to reject. He wanted to cry but only a lewd, inarticulate, choked thoracic gargle left his lips. Shtolz tried next to yell but the wall of undigested raw input stifled his rage.

And the God in whom Emil had not the slightest shred of belief, this God who suddenly chose to intervene and assert himself, declaring as he did so that he chose not to be a merciful God, took the black core of Emil Shtolz deeply into madness.