Free Hideaway by Dean Koontz

They extended the length of his spine.
    “Okay,” Jonas said.
    Kari clicked the switch on the heating pads.
    “But easy,” Jonas advised.
    Kari adjusted the temperature controls.
    They needed to warm the body, but potential problems could arise from a too-rapid reheating. Every resuscitation was a tightrope walk.
    Jonas tended to the syringes in the IV ports, administering additional doses of vitamins E and C, tirilazad mesylate, and phenyl tertiary butyl nitrone.
    The patient was motionless, pale. He reminded Jonas of a figure in a life-size tableau in some old cathedral: the supine body of Christ sculpted from white marble, rendered by the artist in the position of entombment as He would have rested just prior to the most successful resurrection of all time.
    Because Kari Dovell had peeled back Harrison’s eyelids for the ophthalmoscopic examination, his eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and Gina was putting artificial tears in them with a dropper to insure that the lenses did not dry out. She hummed “Little Surfer Girl” as she worked. She was a Beach Boys fan.
    No shock or fear was visible in the cadaver’s eyes, as one might have expected. Instead, they held an expression that was almost peaceful, almost touched by wonder. Harrison looked as if he had seen something, in the moment of death, to lift his heart.
    Finishing with the eyedrops, Gina checked her watch. “Sixty-eight minutes.”
    Jonas had the crazy urge to tell her to shut up, as though time would halt as long as she was not calling it out, minute by minute.
    Blood pumped in and out of the bypass machine.
    “Sixty-two degrees.” Helga spoke so sternly that she might have been chastising the dead man for the laggardly pace of his reheating.
    Flat lines on the EKG.
    Flat lines on the EEG.
    “Come on,” Jonas urged. “Come on, come on.”

4
    He entered the museum of the dead not through one of its upper doors but through the waterless lagoon. In that shallow depression, three gondolas still lay on the cracked concrete. They were ten-passenger models that had long ago been tipped off the heavy chain-drive track along which they’d once carried their happy passengers. Even at night, wearing sunglasses, he could see they did not have the swan-neck prows of real gondolas in Venice, but sported leering gargoyles as figureheads, hand-carved from wood, garishly painted, perhaps fearsome at one time but now cracked, weathered, and peeling. The lagoon doors, which in better days had swung smoothly out of the way at the approach of each gondola, were no longer motorized. One of them was frozen open; the other was closed, but it was hanging from only two of its four corroded hinges. He walked through the open door into a passageway that was far blacker than the night behind him.
    He took off the sunglasses. He didn’t need them in that gloom.
    Neither did he require a flashlight. Where an ordinary man would have been blind, he could see.
    The concrete sluiceway, along which the gondolas had once moved, was three feet deep and eight feet wide. A much narrower channel in the sluiceway floor contained the rusted chain-drive mechanism—a long series of blunt, curved, six-inch-high hooks that had pulled the boats forward by engaging the steel loops on the bottoms of their hulls. When the ride had been in operation, those hooks had been concealed by water, contributing to the illusion that the gondolas were actually adrift. Now, dwindling into the dreary realm ahead, they looked like a row of stubby spines on the back of an immense prehistoric reptile.
    The world of the living, he thought, is always fraught with deception. Beneath the placid surface, ugly mechanisms grind away at secret tasks.
    He walked deeper into the building. The gradual downward slope of the sluiceway was at first barely perceptible, but he was aware of it because he had passed that way many times before.
    Above him, to either side of the channel, were concrete service