sleepy harbor islands, where stood unused, in blocky Quincy granite, a windowless castle now ruled by rats; there were empty ramparts and prone guns alongside drooping Stars and Stripes. Into Fort Warren they went, the doctor trailing the officer past a row of ghost-white policemen already on the scene: through a maze of rooms; down into a cold, pitch-dark stone tunnel; and finally into a hollowed-out storage chamber.
The little doctor stumbled and nearly fell down. His mind jumped through time. When studying at the Ecole de Medecine in Paris, young Holmes had seen the combats des animaux, a barbaric exhibition of bulldogs fighting each other, then being turned loose on a wolf, a bear, a wild boar, a bull, and a jackass tied to a post. Holmes knew even during the audacity of youth that he could never quite get the iron of Calvinism out of his soul, no matter how much poetry he wrote. There was still the temptation to believe the world was a mere trap for human sin. But sin, the way he saw it, was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law. For his forefathers, the great mystery of life was this sin; for Dr. Holmes, it was suffering. He would have never expected to find so much of it. The dark memory, the inhuman cheers and laughter, stampeded into Holmes's dazed mind now as he looked ahead.
From the center of the room, hanging on a hook meant for storing bags of salt or some similarly pouched supplies, a face stared at him. Or, more accurately, it had been a face. The nose was sliced away cleanly, all the way from the bridge to the mustached lip, causing the skin to fold over. One of the man's ears dangled deciduously from the side of the face, low enough, indeed, to brush against the rigidly arched shoulder. Both cheeks were sliced in such a manner that the jaw dropped to a permanent position of openness, as if speech might come at any moment; but instead, blood poured black from his mouth. A straight line of blood was drawn between the heavily indented chin and the reproductive organ of the man - and this organ, the only remaining confirmation of the monstrosity's gender, was itself split horribly in half, a dissection inconceivable even to the doctor. Muscles, nerves, and blood vessels unfolded themselves in unvarying anatomical harmony and baffling disorder. The body's arms hung helplessly at his sides, ending in dark pulps wrapped in flooded tourniquets. There were no hands.
It was a moment before Holmes realized he had seen the decimated face before and another moment still until he recognized the mangled victim, from the pronounced dimple doggedly remaining on his chin. Oh no. The interval between the two conscious moments was an annihilation.
Holmes took a step back, his shoe gliding through the vomit that had been deposited by the first discoverer of the scene, a vagrant looking for shelter. Holmes twisted himself into a nearby chair, positioned as though for the purpose of observing all this. He wheezed uncontrollably and did not notice that to the side of his feet was a vest of a distractingly bright color neatly folded atop hand-tailored white pants and, on the floor, scattered scraps of paper.
He heard his name spoken. Patrolman Rey stood nearby. Even the air in the room seemed to tremble, to push the whole arrangement upside down.
Holmes tumbled to his feet and shook his head dizzily at Rey.
A plainclothes detective, broad-shouldered and with a strong beard, marched over to Rey and began yelling that he did not belong there. Then Chief Kurtz intervened and pulled the detective away.
The doctor's nauseated wheezing spell left him standing in a place closer to the twisted carnage than he would have wished, but before he could think to move away, he felt his arm brushed by something wet. It felt like a hand, but in fact it was a bloody, tourniqueted stump. Yet Holmes had not moved an inch - he was sure of that. He was too shocked to move. He felt as if he were in that type of nightmare where one can only pray to himself that he is dreaming.
"Heaven help us, it's alive!" screamed the detective, running off, his voice strangled by his tight hold on a rising flood from his stomach. Chief Kurtz, too, disappeared, shouting.
As Holmes spun around, he looked directly into the blankly bulging eyes of the maimed, naked