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the columella, and repaired his lip with an interesting Abbe flap procedure that drew an audience of doctors to the operating theater.

The surgeons were proud of the result. Dolarhyde declined the mirror and looked out the window.

Records at the film library show Dolarhyde checked out many films, mainly on trauma, and kept them overnight.

He reenlisted in 1958 and in his second hitch he foundHong Kong. Stationed atSeoul,Korea, developing film from the tiny spotter planes the Army floated over the thirty-eighth parallel in the late 1950's, he was able to go toHong Kongtwice on leave. Hong Kong andKowlooncould satisfy any appetite in 1959.

Grandmother was released from the sanatorium in 1961 in a vague Thorazine peace. Dolarhyde asked for and received a hardship discharge two months before his scheduled separation date and went home to take care of her.

It was a curiously peaceful time for him as well. With his new job at Gateway, Dolarhyde could hire a woman to stay with Grandmother in the daytime. At night they sat in the parlor together, not speaking. The tick of the old clock and its chimes were all that broke the silence.

He saw his mother once, at Grandmother's funeral in 1970. He looked through her, past her, with his yellow eyes so startlingly like her own. She might have been a stranger.

His appearance surprised his mother. He was deep-chested and sleek, with her fine coloring and a neat mustache which she suspected was hair transplanted from his head.

She called him once in the next week and heard the receiver slowly replaced.

* * *

For nine years after Grandmother's death Dolarhyde was untroubled and he troubled no one. His forehead was as smooth as a seed. He knew that he was waiting. For what, he didn't know.

One small event, which occurs to everyone, told the seed in his skull it was Time: standing by a north window, examining some film, he noticed aging in his hands. It was as though his hands, holding the film, had suddenly appeared before him and he saw in that good north light that the skin had slackened over the bones and tendons and his hands were creased in diamonds as small as lizard scales.

As he turned them in the light, an intense odor of cabbage and stewed tomatoes washed over him. He shivered though the room was warm. That evening he worked out harder than usual.

A full-length mirror was mounted on the wall of Dolarhyde's attic gym beside his barbells and weight bench. It was the only mirror hanging in his house, and he could admire his body in it comfortably because he always worked out in a mask.

He examined himself carefully while his muscles were pumped up.

At forty, he could have competed successfully in regional body-building competition. He was not satisfied.

Within the week he came upon the Blake painting. It seized him instantly.

He saw it in a large, full-color photograph in Time magazine illustrating a report on the Blake retrospective at theTateMuseuminLondon. TheBrooklynMuseumhad sent The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun toLondonfor the show.

Time's critic said: "Few demonic images in Western art radiate such a nightmarish charge of sexual energy..." Dolarhyde didn't have to read the text to find that out.

He carried the picture with him for days, photographed and enlarged it in the darkroom late at night. He was agitated much of the time. He posted the painting beside his mirror in the weight room and stared at it while he pumped. He could sleep only when he had worked out to exhaustion and watched his medical films to aid him in sexual relief.

He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone and that he would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties.

Now, in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took him a step beyond Alone.

At a time when other men first see and fear their isolation, Dolarhyde's became understandable to him: he was alone because he was Unique. With the fervor of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept down for so long-cultivated them as the inspirations they truly were - he could Become.

The Dragon's face is not visible in the painting, but increasingly Dolarhyde came to know how it looked.

Watching his medical films in the parlor, pumped up from lifting, he stretched his jaw wide to hold in Grandmother's teeth.