Winterlong Read Free

and developed new strains of oleander within bell-shaped greenhouses. Empties moved into bungalows where valets and chefs once slept.
    In an earlier century Lawrence Linden had been a patron of the arts. Autographed copies of Joyce and Stein and the lost Crowley manuscripts graced the Linden Glory libraries. We had a minor Botticelli, two frayed Rothkos, and many Raphaels; the famed pre-Columbian collection for which a little war was fought; antiquarian coins and shelves of fine and rare Egyptian glass. From the Victorian music room with its decaying Whistler panels echoed the peacock screams of empties and patients engaged in therapy.
    Always I remained Dr. Harrow’s pet: an exquisite monster capable of miming every human emotion and even feeling many of them via the therapy I made possible. Every evening doctors administered syringes and capsules and tiny tabs that adhered to my temples like burdock pods, releasing chemicals directly into my corpus striatum. And every morning I woke from someone else’s dreams.
    Morgan sat in the gazebo when I arrived for our meeting, her hair pulled beneath a biretta of indigo velvet worn to a nap like a dog’s skull. She had already eaten, but HEL’s overworked servers had yet to clear her plate. I picked up the remains of a brioche and nibbled its sugary crust.
    “None of you have any manners, do you?” She smiled, but her eyes were red and cloudy with hatred. “They told me that during orientation.”
    I ran my tongue over a sweet nugget in a molar and nodded. “That’s right.”
    “You can’t feel anything or learn anything unless it’s slipped into your breakfast coffee.”
    “I drink tea.” I glanced around the Orphic Garden for a server. “You’re early.”
    “I had trouble sleeping.”
    I nodded and finished the brioche.
    “I had trouble sleeping because I had no dreams.” She leaned across the table and repeated in a hiss, “I had no dreams. I carried that memory around with me for sixty years and last night I had no dreams.”
    Yawning, I rubbed the back of my head, adjusting a quill. “You still have all your memories. Dr. Harrow said you wanted to end the nightmares. I’m surprised we were successful.”
    “You were not successful.” She towered above me when she stood, the table tilting toward her as she clutched its edge. “Monster.”
    “Sacred monster. I thought you liked sacred monsters.” I grinned, pleased that I’d bothered to read the sample poem included with her chart.
    “Bitch. How dare you laugh at me. Whore—you’re all whores and thieves.” She stepped toward me, her heel catching between the mosaic stones. “No more of me—you’ll steal no more of me.…”
    I drew back a little, blinking in the emerald light as I felt the first adrenaline pulse. “You shouldn’t be alone,” I said. “Does Dr. Harrow know?”
    She blocked the sun so that it exploded around the biretta’s peaks in resplendent ribbons. “Doctor Harrow will know,” she whispered, and drawing a pistol from her pocket she shot herself through the eye.
    I knocked my chair over as I stumbled to her, knelt, and caught the running blood and her last memory as I bowed to touch my tongue to her severed thoughts.
    A window smeared with garnet light that ruddles across my hands. Burning wax in a small blue glass. A laughing dog; then darkness.
    They hid me under the guise of protecting me from the shock. I gave a sworn statement for the Governors and acknowledged in the HEL mortuary that the long body with blackened face had indeed shared her breakfast brioche with me that morning. I glimpsed Dr. Harrow, white and taut as a thread as Odolf Leslie and the other Ascendant brass cornered her outside the emergency room. Then the Aide Justice hurried me into the west wing, past the pre-Columbian collection and the ivory stair to an ancient Victorian elevator, clanking and lugubrious as a stage dragon.
    “Dr. Harrow thought that you might like the Home Room,” Justice