With a wrenching shriek of sheared masonry bolts, the heavy steel door of the Pathology Archive Room tore completely out of its concrete frame.
Three-inch iron anchor screws popped from the tiled wall like rifle shots. Propelled by a single shove from the corridor outside, the four-hundred-pound door crashed flat onto the rubber floor runner. A shockwave of freezing air and pulverized mortar dust rolled across the mahogany lectern.
Standing in the jagged ruin of the doorway was Dr. Victor Tallow.
He towered seven feet tall under the flickering fluorescent tubes, draped in a rotted 1974 surgical gown dark with thirty years of crusted formalin and yellow adipose grease. Across his brow sat the empty, tarnished brass head-strap bracket where Julian had ripped away his concave silver head-mirror on the fourth floor. The dented band dug deep into the weeping yellow tallow of his skull like an iron crown.
Below that dented brass band, his face was a blank, featureless expanse of sweating wax. There were no eyes, no nostrils, and no lips--only a sunken, pulsing membrane of gray tallow over the throat where a sixty-cycle electrical current hummed in the wet dark.
In his right hand, Tallow gripped the thirty-inch post-mortem amputation saw. In his left, he carried an eight-pound stainless-steel Finochietto rib-spreader, its curved rack-and-pinion jaws cranked wide open like an iron bear trap.
