Free Dead and Alive by Dean Koontz

camera.”
    “Over it? Aren’t we going to have an album?” Janet asked.
    “I don’t think we need an album. I think we’re going to be so busy living this, doing one house after another, that we won’t have time to
re
live anything.”
    “So you’re ready to do one of them?”
    “I am more than ready,” Bucky confirmed.
    “How many do you think we can do together before morning?”
    “I think twenty or thirty, easy.”
    Janet’s eyes were bright in the gloom. “I think a hundred.”
    “That’s something to shoot for,” Bucky said.

CHAPTER 15
    ON THE GLASSED-IN PORCH , planter baskets hung from the ceiling. In the gloom, the ferns cascading from the baskets seemed to be giant spiders perpetually poised to strike.
    Not afraid of the troll but not content to sit in the dark with him, either, Erika lit a candle in a faceted red cup. The geometrics of the glass translated the mercurial flame into luminous polygons that shimmered on the troll’s face, which might have been a cubist portrait of Poe’s Red Death if the Red Death in the story had been a funny-looking dwarfish guy with a knobby chin, a lipless slit for a mouth, warty skin, and huge, expressive, beautiful—and eerie—eyes.
    As Victor’s wife, Erika was expected to be witty and well-spoken when she was a hostess at events in this house and when she was a guest, with her husband, at other social occasions. Therefore, she hadbeen programmed with an encyclopedia of literary allusions that she could draw upon effortlessly, though she had never read any of the books to which the allusions referred.
    In fact, she was strictly forbidden to read books. Erika Four, her predecessor, had spent a lot of time in Victor’s well-stocked library, perhaps with the intention of improving herself and being a better wife. But books corrupted her, and she was put down like a diseased horse.
    Books were dangerous. Books were the most dangerous things in the world, at least for any wife of Victor Helios. Erika Five did not know why this should be true, but she understood that if she began to read books, she would be cruelly punished and perhaps terminated.
    For a while, from across the table, she and the troll regarded each other with interest, as she drank her cognac and he drank the Far Niente Chardonnay that she had given him. For good reason, she said nothing, and he seemed to understand and to have sympathy for the position in which his few words, spoken earlier, had put her.
    When he first came to the window and pressed his forehead to the glass, gazing in at her on the porch, before Erika packed a picnic hamper for him, the troll had said, “Harker.”
    Pointing to herself, she had said, “Erika.”
    His smile, then, had been an ugly wound. No doubt it would be no less hideous if he smiled again, for he possessed a face that familiarity did not improve.
    As tolerant of his unfortunate appearance as a good hostess should be, Erika had continued to stare through the window at him until in his raspy voice he had said, “Hate him.”
    Neither of them had spoken again on the troll’s first visit. And for the time being, silence served them well on this second tête-à-tête.
    She dared not ask whom he hated, for if he answered with the name of her master, she would be required, by her program, either to restrain and detain him or to warn the appropriate people of the danger that he posed.
    Her failure to betray the troll immediately might earn her a beating. On the other hand, if she reported him at once, she might nevertheless be beaten anyway. In this game, the rules were not clear; besides, all the rules applied to her, none to her husband.
    At this hour, all of the household staff were in the dormitory at the back of the estate, most likely engaged in the intense and often brutal sexual activity that was the only release from tension allowed their kind.
    Victor liked his privacy at night. She suspected that he needed little if any sleep, but she didn’t know