Chapter Three

I

 

 

It was night when he stopped at the flashing arms of a railroad crossing. The klaxons twisted his insides. He opened the door and puked. Murderous thunder of passing flats vibrated his bones. While he was spilling his guts onto the pitted asphalt, someone climbed in on the passenger side, slammed the door hard enough to rock the car.

Conrad wiped his mouth, regarded the dark-haired girl in the denim jacket and bellbottom pants who was calmly checking her makeup in the visor mirror. A livid strawberry keloid ripened on her left wrist, partially occluded by a charm bracelet. She smelled of cigarettes and Prince Matchabelli and seemed unpleasantly familiar. One of those malleable faces he’d seen a lot of lately; it glowed a blurry white in the gloom.

“Ever wonder what’s in those boxcars?” Her voice was husky from the rawness of the country air. “Could be cattle, could be people, political prisoners on the way to Gitmo. Anything, really. See their eyes in the headlights, peeking between the slats.”

Conrad was dizzy. Concussion, definitely. Goddamn, he hoped it was a concussion. Looking at her almost caused him to be sick again. Was he hallucinating? He didn’t think so. He wasn’t certain of anything, even gravity.

“I’m Rhonda. Where you goin’?” Her eyes were small and lively. She nervously rifled a leather handbag with a peace symbol stitched on the flap. “You don’t mind, I hope…? I was freezing out there.”

He hadn’t noticed her at the crossing, hadn’t seen her at all. She likely planted herself nearby, hoped to catch some poor sucker who got blocked by the train. Popped up like a trapdoor spider.

Rhonda nodded at her bag. “So…where’d you say you were goin’?”

“West.” His mantra. And in truth, the answer was South if he kept on to the end. South into the magma boiling heart of the world, and onward to Hell.

“Cool. Me too.” She lighted a clove cigarette, glanced around the interior, wrinkled her nose. “Old car you got here. Wow, is this your mom?” She tapped a black and white photo pinned to the visor; a dark woman in a gypsy kerchief smiled from the shade of an elm.

“It’s a classic.” Conrad stared at the train, the lights.

Rhonda exhaled gustily. “Wow. Somebody kicked the shit outta you, didn’t they. You feelin’ alright, man? Train’s gone.”

Indeed it was gone, reduced to a shadowy wedge lit by blue and red beacons. His hands shook as he put the Eldorado into gear. Seem to fly it, it will pursue…hadn’t Ben Jonson said that about shadows? Jung knew; Hesse knew; Nietzsche absolutely knew. The Germans were canny. Conrad thought about shadows, how there were so many to choose from, how hungry and insatiable they proved to be. Relentless as cancer. “You picked the wrong car.”

“Oh, yeah? Are you a psycho?” The girl smiled as if at a joke.

“It’s a bad time for me.”

“Well, it ain’t so wonderful for me either. My last two hitches were from horny truckers. Some fun. Home, James.”

Conrad sighed. “Wanda, I’m beat. I’m going to get a room and crash for the night.” He’d spotted a sign that said FOOD GAS LODGING THREE MILES. That would be the Happy Raven and it was on his list of places to go, the very reason he’d driven across the belly of the country, taken an unsanctioned bout against a no-name flak. The fight had been one of his many pretexts to lurk in this geographical region, to conduct his private manhunt within a manhunt, a veritable nested Russian doll of plots and stratagems.

The machinery was in motion. It was down to the lounge singer, the English professor or the retired politico. He’d picked the lounge singer because the lounge singer was as good as any and because the lounge singer had been a traveling man. Travel always made for interesting conversation. According to his sources, the man he sought worked the lounge Friday through Sunday, six to ten P.M., had done so for the last eighteen months. Conrad reflected that often the most slippery ones were those who never really tried to cover their tracks.

“It’s Rhonda.”

“Yeah.”

II

 

 

Rhonda tagged along as Conrad registered in the hotel lobby. She adjourned with him to the lounge for the theatre half of dinner theatre. Five minutes and two margaritas later, she spotted a gaunt man in a razor-crisp Armani suit who disappeared through the door with the fly-spackled EXIT sign.

“Omigod—there’s Raul!”

“Who’s Raul?” Conrad asked half-heartedly. Too familiar faces, too familiar names. The only Raul he knew was presumed dead at the bottom of some Mexican landfill. Time for another drink. Rhonda patted Conrad’s hand, promised to be back in a jiff. Her small, quick eyes had gone over to black. She smiled a shark’s smile and followed the immaculate stranger.

Conrad hoped that was the end. Meanwhile, it was just him and the lush and a whiskey river. He even toasted Mr. Willie Nelson. “God bless you, Willie.”

The lush wasn’t interested in Willie Nelson. He was a Rat Pack man. He gazed at Conrad. “Gotta say, real clean,” the lush said. He wore a silk blazer open at the neck to display a clunky gold medallion. His hard cheeks shone like a polished boot. He sat stiffly; an action figure melting under a sun lamp.

The lush called himself Marty Cardinal, although Conrad knew the man’s birth certificate; his forty year old visa stamped a dozen places in the Orient, the Middle East and points between; and his dog tags said something different. But, tonight, as every other smoky, gin-soaked night for several crumbling decades, it had been Marty Cardinal. He sweated through a poorly-dyed pompadour from his last set of Dean Martin and Perry Como covers ala Tom Jones on Quaaludes. The audience of the Happy Raven Lounge, which included the requisite barside lechers and a few drunken seniors on a pit stop from their bus tour, had applauded tepidly as Cardinal ambled from the stage and listed to the dim corner where Conrad nursed a boilermaker. They’d never met before Conrad told the waitress to slip the crooner a crisp g-note and ask him if he could fake his way through My Rifle, My Pony And Me, but no time like the present, according to the singer as he’d ordered a round from the baggy-eyed cocktail waitress, Put it on my tab, sweetheart, baby face.“They sewed you up real nice, kid. Maybe you should get ’em to do you a favor and stitch that cheek of yours. It’s nasty.”

“Bad, huh?” Conrad’s brain had reached the stage where it decided to begin shutting off nonessential functions. Everything from the neck down belonged to a fossilized cave bear. At least his gorge was staying put.

“Oh, yeah. But the old ones…boy, it looks like ya got yourself caught by a buzzsaw, or something’.” Cardinal emphasized that observation by gulping his drink with nary a shudder and snapping his fingers for another Johnny Walker on the rocks and make it a double, those damned lights were hot as the hubs of Hades.

Conrad resisted the urge to touch his own face. Obscured by fresh bruises and the jagged cut that had scabbed quite dramatically, the underlying scar forked from his hairline, paralleled the orbital of his left eye; another branch hooked behind his cauliflower ear. A venerable scar, among the first in his expanding collection.

Conrad fell away from the ticky-tack tables, the guttering votives and swan-necked men in polyester suits, plunged down the black shaft to a lonely farm in a lonely field, the abattoir lit by swaying kerosene lanterns, its concrete floor and antique drains choked with straw and dust, the leopard on his chest tearing at his face until the skin began to flex like a latex mask. All those wet mouths in the gallery, their collective exhortations no louder than a breeze sighing through tall grass; all those empty eyes brittle as malachite, radiating the coldness of serried ranks of knives hanging points-down from a rack.

Few animals were a match for a professional fighting man if the struggle lasted beyond that initial explosion of sinew and adrenaline. Amateur hour; the gallery stifled yawns and rattled ice in their drinks as the blood poured out at their feet.

Conrad had been young and sloppy. And lucky. Mr. Kosokian always retained first class medics. The plastic surgeon, a convict on a short leash, had been a consummate professional. With a good tan, the marks were nearly invisible.

Marty Cardinal said, “I played Vegas once. Shook Sammy’s hand, damned if I didn’t. He was a quick-draw fella. Didja know? Quick-draw. Pow-pow-pow with these six-guns like Marshal Dillon on Gun Smoke. It was a hoot. Dorsey! Dorsey, c’mere a minute!” He waved at the piano player, a fellow septuagenarian in an exhausted white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. “Dorsey an’ me go back. Traveled the Northwest circuit together. Did a USO tour with Neil Diamond. Dorsey tickles those ivories like none other. Billy Joel called him Magic Fingers.”

“Nah, that’s what Billy’s wife called me.” Dorsey summoned the waitress and put in for fresh drinks all around. He constantly riffled a worn deck of cards, first left-handed, then right. “Any chum of Marty C., yadda yadda. Marty this guy a boxer. Looks like a boxer. You a boxer, sonny?”

“I know from boxers, Dorsey. He ain’t no boxer. He look like Rocky Marciano to you? He look like Gerry Cooney? Where’s yer girlfriend, kid?” Marty Cardinal was methodically stacking his dead soldiers in a glistening ziggurat, a sacrificial altar.

“She returned to the Mother Ship, I think,” Conrad said.

“Oh, she wasn’t a hooker, right? She wasn’t a working girl ya picked up from under an off ramp, or anything?”

Conrad smiled wryly, lighted a cigarette and pressed it to his swollen lips.

Dorsey snorted, passed his cards to and fro. He had the jaw of a horse and crooked hands blotched with liver spots. “Ah, Marty, she wasn’t on the job. College kid down on her luck. A dropout for certain—prolly afraid to go home to ma an’ pa, so she’s bummin’ around with dubious sorts. No offense.”

“You a dubious character, kid?”

“Mr. Cardinal—”

“Call me Marty C.”

“What did you do before?”

“Eh? Before what?”

Conrad gestured at the room. “Before Vegas. Before any of this.”

“Hear that, Dorsey? He wants to know about, ‘Once Upon a Time.’” Marty Cardinal helped himself to another drink. His smile was chilly.

“I heard what he said.” Dorsey studied his cards.

“You were in the Army.”

Marty Cardinal nodded. “Korea. Nastiest hellhole on the planet. Still dream about the cold. Ya been checking into my back story, eh kid?”

“Yes. I’ve been to the ends of the Earth, and here you are. In this place.”

“Huh. Hear that, Dorsey? The kid’s been looking for me. Maybe I owe him some money. Cripes, I hope ya can squeeze blood from a turnip, kiddo. My three exes cleaned me out ages ago; took my cars, my condos, the whole schmeer. How’d ya find me, anyhow?”

“Detective agency. It wasn’t difficult.” Conrad pulled a creased flyer from his wallet; a promotional shot of a younger, thinner, slickly-dressed Marty Cardinal bracketed by showgirls. The singer had scrawled his autograph across the back.

“Holy Toledo. That’s from the Sands!” Marty Cardinal shook his head in bleary wonder.

The cocktail waitress leaned into their circle, handed Conrad a cell phone; eyed him suspiciously as if he might go for her throat at any moment. “For you.”

He smiled painfully, hoping to reassure her, said into the receiver, “Conrad.”

Singh said, “Conrad, Conrad. What are you doing?” The connection was poor.

Strangely enough, it seemed these men whose stock and trade was surreptitious communication seldom managed a line clear of interference. Of course, for all Conrad knew, Singh was calling from the bowels of a slumbering volcano, or a submarine at the bottom of the South Pacific. “I’m relaxing. Conducting a pleasant conversation with friends. Yourself?”

“Conducting a what? An interrogation, you say?”

Conrad covered the receiver with his chin. “What happened after the Army.” He swept his hand under the tabletop, groping for a mike, a wire, anything suspicious.

“Whozatt on the horn?”

“It’s not Don King,” Conrad said.

Marty Cardinal and Dorsey chuckled and the glacier receded. Marty Cardinal said, “Broadway, baby. After Korea I moved to the Apple, tried to get my name in lights.”

“Who is that charming, drunken fellow I hear?” Singh buzzed.

Conrad held up a finger as he addressed Singh. “A war hero. I’m drinking him under the table.”

“Oh my, a real live war hero—is there such a thing? You must be punch drunk, poor boy. Buy him a shot for me, though. Just in case.”

“Karmic insurance?”

“Indeed. I’m certainly in the market… Look, Rob mentioned that you called earlier. He’s worried about you.”

“He’s worried about his money, you mean.”

“Our money. We share everything. Basically, we’re married. Please meet me at that museum in Coleville. You know the one—it’s on your way, isn’t it? Fourteen-hundred hours on Friday. We can speak of cabbages and kings, the weather in Buenos Aires.”

“You owe somebody money? Is that why ya got yer head busted?” Marty Cardinal had finished off another round. “That the s.o.b. who beat the tar outta ya, kid?”

“Okay,” Conrad said. “I’ll be there. It may be close.”

“Drive like the wind, mate,” Singh said. “Oh, and Conrad…I’m glad you’re in one piece. Ciao.”

“I’m touched,” Conrad said, but Singh was gone. “Sorry, Mr.—Marty. And after Broadway, you moved west, didn’t you? Washington, Idaho? Do you recall a man named Ambrose Drake?”

“Huh?”

“Ambrose Drake. He was a doctor—a surgeon.”

Marty Cardinal’s face slammed shut. He began snapping his fingers frantically at the waitress.

“Ambrose Drake. A tall, distinguished gentleman. Very dark, very ethnic.”

“What sorta trouble are you in?” Dorsey glanced up from his cards. “Unless you’re writin’ a book—”

“I’m not writing a book.”

“Then what?” Marty Cardinal gripped the edge of the table, a man clinging to a piece of flotsam in heavy seas. “What the hell ya want from me. Y-you’re—this is ancient history.”

“Is it?”

“I dunno a goddamned thing.”

“Dr. Ambrose Drake,” Conrad said. “He treated your grandson.”

“Go to hell.”

“Consider me the Ghost of Christmas Past. I know everything. You came to the Cloister to visit a child. You don’t recognize me? I was a boy, so it’s understandable. You I recall quite vividly. I thought you were an officer, even in civilian clothes. You had that military bearing. Command presence. Hadn’t quite reinvented yourself as Frank Sinatra.”

Marty Cardinal appeared ill. He gagged down an inch of bourbon. “The clinic. I dunno—”

“His name was Dick, your grandson. He had leukemia,” Conrad said. He was hardly drunk, now. His hands were steady, his tone flat with honed menace. Coupled with his grotesque scarring, his brawny shoulders and immense hands, the menace shtick was reliable. “There were a lot of people at the clinic, but I could never forget Dick either. A piano prodigy, just like your pal Dorsey there. Loved model planes and baseball. My brother called him Dicky, talked about him nonstop. Real amigos, those two. My brother had a tumor named Jake, by the way.”

Marty Cardinal spilled his drink, knocked over the stack of empties when he clumsily sopped the mess.

“Dicky’s head was always shaved…”

Marty Cardinal’s eyes leaked; his mouth hung slack and ugly with the shock of recollection, of demons loosed and ravenous.

“Leave him alone,” Dorsey said.

“Are you crying? Don’t do that. Please, I need you to look at something. Dr. Drake gave this to some of them to study.” Conrad made the promotional photo disappear and drew another tattered sheet of paper from his coat, held it near the light. The paper was papyrus-yellow, saturated with water stains and splashed by violent brush-work that resembled the craft of a demented calligrapher. “I’ve been told that the military used tools like this, back in the days when you were in the service. This, however, was originally created by Dr. Drake as a visual psychotropic, albeit inert without the concomitant verbal trigger. Uncle Sam considered buying the protocol, but passed. Have another look—you’ve seen it before.”

“Aww, no.” Marty Cardinal bawled. He covered his eyes. “Aww no, no, no.”

Conrad gaped in wonder and horror, then collected himself sufficiently to proceed with the Hoover-style third degree. “Any of these sound familiar? MK-Ultra. Majestic Twelve. Project TALLHAT. Project Bluebook.”

Marty Cardinal hunched tighter, refused to look. Wow, a monster. Look!

“It’s okay, chum.” Dorsey slung a scrawny arm over Marty Cardinal’s shoulders and glared venomously at Conrad. “You better get. He’s got nothin’ to say to you.”

Conrad forged ahead, implacable as a steamroller. “Some say the doctor is yet among the living. Drake was decrepit when he administered the Cloister. I’d peg him at one hundred, easy. Not many folks see out a century of birthdays. Must be one hell of a medicine man, assuming he even exists. I don’t think the Drake we know ever did.”

“Who sent ya? I’m out. They said I was out. Lyin’ sonsabitches.”

“No one sent me. I’m a free agent, an inquiring mind. I want to know more about the Drake Technique.”

“I don’t know shit.”

“I suppose if the CIA had gotten around to co-opting his research they’d have given it some silly code name. Probably converted it to something absolutely unimaginative—OPERATION MINDFUCK. Bureaucrats, eh? For God’s sake, stop crying, would you.” It was rubbing Conrad’s nerves raw, the moaning and weeping, waking the lizard, the creature that always wanted a bite of something weak and vulnerable. His fingers curled.

“Screw ya, ya punk. This is bullshit.”

“You were on the team of spooks that debriefed Drake and his scientists about his “Technique.” Istanbul, summer of ’60. The CIA was just checking it out, you didn’t actually appropriate the intellectual property, probably because everyone thought it was a hoax. They were correct. So your commanding officers examined the evidence and cut the doctor loose, let him creep back under some rock.”

Marty Cardinal whined.

Conrad grinned, heartless and deranged, and tossed back a raw double vodka without removing his feral gaze from Marty Cardinal. Compassion was too heavy a load this far up the mountain. “But a couple decades later when poor Dicky got sick, you didn’t hesitate, not for one second, did you? You’d sensed something in Drake. You knew he was the real thing, that he held the power of life and death in a big way. Sadly, it wasn’t about helping your grandson. Dicky was, how do you military folks say it?—expendable. Nah, you offered the poor little tyke up to the dark gods in a black magic ritual at the doctor’s clinic. You’d have done a lot worse to become a high wire Vegas act. Irony of it is, that sadist probably didn’t even need your grandson, or any of those kids, to fuel his experiments. I think Drake accepted sacrifices because that’s just how Satan gets his kicks. Cruelty to mortals.”

“Go ’way,” Marty Cardinal said, muffled into his hand.

“Examine the drawing and I will.”

“Go ’way.”

“Look at the drawing,” Conrad said with bared teeth. Then, softly, “I’m sorry, Marty. Truly, I am. You were there. Most of the others are gone, or missing—and my time is short. I can’t leave until you look at the drawing. So look.”

“You prick,” Dorsey said.

Marty Cardinal sobbed, but he spread his fingers and stared at the piece of paper for several seconds, until his bloodshot eye began to blink rapidly and overflowed and he covered it again. “I wasn’t a spook. Nope. Thass just a color field. A fuggin’ Rorschach, maybe. It don’ mean nothin’.”

That’s what they all said, more or less. “Oh, it bears some significance. Try again.”

“Not to me. Not to anybody. It’s a fuggin’ inkblot.”

“When your grandson concentrated on the drawing what did he see?”

“You prick,” Dorsey said.

For a long moment Marty Cardinal remained hunched, his frame sagging in grief. Then he said, “Barbs.”

“Barbs,” Conrad said.

“The Barbs of God. Dicky was eleven years old. The last three months of his life, God is all he talked about. How God was going to eat every one of us. You too, grandpa. You too.” Marty Cardinal pointed at Conrad. “You too, ya lousy sonofabitch.”

“Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: Dicky had a word. A trigger. What was it?”

“Whah?”

“The trigger, Marty. The auto-hypnotic trigger. Short, pithy, maybe a tad sinister.”

“I don’ remember.”

“Yes, yes you do. I don’t think you’ve forgotten anything about Dicky. No matter how much you drink, you won’t. My father never got over what he did to his son, either.” Conrad studied the shrinking glare of his cigarette coal, contemplated touching it to the web of Marty Cardinal’s thumb and index finger. Marsh or Singh would’ve carted the crooner to a private location and done exactly that, would’ve done a hell of a lot more than that, in fact.

“Why ya wanna know the word? Takes more than the word. You gotta look at a whole shitpot a pictures like that one there, listen to some scary recordings. Whole series of injections. There’s a chemical protocol. Word won’ help ya.”

“I’m aware of the protocols. Intimately.”

“Ya took the series?” Cunning surfaced in Marty Cardinal’s watery eyes. A glimmer of viciousness and well-oiled deceit. “I read the numbers once…the injections kill six outta ten. Drives three point five more bugshit mad. Ya took the series. No wonder you’re… It was the Brazilian, huh?”

“The process has been refined. It’s a nine in one shot, thanks to modern medicine. No series anymore, not like rabies.” Thanks to Dad. I’ve never been so proud.

“Ya took the Series. Dumbshit. Now they own you. He owns you. Dumbshit.”

“We’ve got a lot in common,” Conrad said. “It grows late, Marty.”

Marty Cardinal must’ve sensed doom in Conrad’s lazy expression. “Yeah, fine. Ya wanna know the magic word, I’ll tell ya. Ain’t a state secret, is it? Whatch ya deserve, I guess.” He half leaned, half sprawled across the table, cupped his hand and whispered the trigger into Conrad’s ear.

Bang.

The world ended.

The world was remade.

The fingernail chasm between destruction and creation was a frozen, howling void, a hairline fracture on the windshield of the onrushing cosmos. It flickered through Conrad’s mind, writhed in microbial convolutions, etched itself into a secret expanse of cerebral membrane, a trilobite embalmed in Paleozoic flowstone.

The lounge sat there, relatively unaffected.

Conrad dropped the paper and it blackened and crisped to ash. Now with the primal rush of aggression leaching from his nervous system he was bone-tired and weak and slightly ashamed of what he’d done. He smoked another guilty cigarette while Marty Cardinal wept and Dorsey wiped his friend’s nose with a napkin and muttered epithets. In a bit the old men lurched from the table, exited through the enigmatic door with the blinky EXIT sign.

Later, when the other drunks were migrating in pods and the bartender began to sadly sweep, Conrad made it to his feet and drifted down the long corridor of swollen, subterranean murk to his room. Empty, thank Christ and the Four Horsemen.

He fell across the bed and sank exactly as a stone dropped edge-first into the sediment far beneath the scales of the sea.

III

 

 

He awoke, although that was not a certainty. His thoughts were sticky, his faculties stupefied. He knew he was in a hotel on planet Earth in the Southwest of the continental United States. This he knew, of this he was certain despite the fact gravity and vertigo conspired against him, despite the open mutiny of his racing heart and shrieking nerves.

The room throbbed with bloodless light, the ashen flush of a landscape under the caul of an eclipse. The amniotic light sluiced against cheap blinds, dripped and seeped through chinks and seams, patterned great, ominous shadows against the clapboard walls. Somewhere, a fan clattered in its cage, a radiator churned.

He was paralyzed. The hotel around him became a translucent honeycomb where nothing stirred in the twilight chill. Rows of beds with lumps of humanity nestled tight.

An inverted female shape hung midway in the gulf beyond the bed and before the opaque blinds. The woman floated, spread-eagle as a Vitruvius Woman, hair flowing against the dingy carpet, her features a sulfurous smear amid velvet and ink. She emitted low static, the electronic snarl of radio waves creeping through the outer regions of solar vacuum. She resonated a Hadal thrum, seethed and roiled like a swarm of wasps in a hive of bones. Her dim shape accumulated mass with each snick of the clock. She achieved a dreadful aspect and unfathomable density and began to uncoil as angel hair, the wings of a man o’ war, a hungry wasp.

(Doyouunderstandwhatishappeningyouunderstandwhatishappeningunderstandwhatishappeningwhatishappeningishappeninghappening?)

He struggled to lift the anchor from his chest and then nothing.

IV

 

 

Conrad was alone when gray morning filtered into his brain. He showered and shaved and noted that his bruises were rapidly healing. Marks of violence giving way to simple weariness, the pouches and bags of encroaching age. Dented, but serviceable.

He drove for hours, sluggish and dreamy, imagining the serum, broken down and reduced to its naked, predatory mode, spiraling through his nervous system, clinging and entwining like morning glory wrapping creepers around a trellis, yearning for heat and sustenance. His fingers tingled, felt detached. The flesh of his cheeks was cool as porcelain. Muscle spasms and tremors. No hallucinations, no blackouts at least. No superhuman powers, either; no cosmic leaps of intuition, no burgeoning sense of godly omnipotence. All quiet, except for numbness and occasional nausea.

The city lifted itself from the flat-backed plains as a colony of blue-bottle glass and aerodynamic steel. Everything was polished to an antiseptic gloss; the boulevards ran in perfect geometric grids and russet leaves collected neatly in gutters and along curbs. Citizens wore winter suits and winter haircuts and were scrubbed bone-white to match the sky. They moved with clockwork precision, aboard shiny Peugeots and BMWs, and on the hoof in their Gucci’s and stolid sensible wingtips; the buildings and the people were clever miniatures of the mighty eastern metropolises poured from a bag of jacks.

Conrad liked that the exchange was to occur in the Coleville Museum of Natural History, a massive and modernized brownstone where the halls were so quiet, the creak of his shoes echoed, chased after grains of dust in hidden corners. Following a ludus there was always an exchange, a greasing of the palm; traditionally the transfer was resolved in an exotic locale; a catacomb; a mosque; a half-collapsed amphitheater along the Turkish coast; atop the ramparts of some rundown castle in Scotland; precisely the canvases upon which Conrad performed his cruel and terrible art. Singh relished such melodrama and Singh called the shots. The museum was an improvement for the simple fact it was indoors during the day in a warm, cheery, if naturally, illuminated environment. Conrad was only sorry they hadn’t adhered to their usual conclaves. A public rendezvous complicated the situation immensely. He calmed himself with the idea that he’d think of something ingenious when the moment of truth arrived.

He waited near a towering cube which enclosed wax simulacrums of Neolithic tribesmen hucking spears at a rampant smilodon. Conrad’s visage hung in a panel of glass. My bothers, my brothers! He concentrated on rebuilding his image after the patterns of the government inkblots until his reflection wavered and ran with the fluidity of oil and—

—he was among them shoulder to shoulder in the arid dawn pale as a flood of dying starshine the sun an ochre smear above fields of bloody grass he waited on smiling death spear in hand animal musk fear musk in his nostrils upon his grimy skins his own skin and that dreadnought was coming for them belly low amid the rocks and weeds that killing machine coming for them coming through the bloody grass with its mouthful of knives coming steady for them as a falling tree a wave an avalanche of bloody rocks upon them hungry as fire for their flesh as fire is hungry for the bloody grass but he stood his ground he had his brothers he had his spear here the monster came silent and hungry as a shadow crossing the earth—

The hunter who most resembled Conrad was sideswiped and folded double under curved strokes of black-splattered ivory; head askew, he grinned at Conrad and said, “They Who Wait have always been among us, brother!” Then a tusk dipped into the hunter’s cheek and a sticky sundew replaced his rude features.

Conrad blinked and there was beautiful, exotic Singh sliding toward him, serenely passing through grainy sun shafts thrown down by phalanxes of skylights. It struck him with a sudden, nauseating clarity that Singh was nothing so much as DeKoon’s enigmatic counterpart, the pallid European’s negative. Conrad was disconcerted to picture that duo ferociously coupled upon a bed in some ramshackle bungalow, yin and yang, the Ouroboros swallowing its tail while earthquakes rocked the Andes and a cloud blotted the sun.

Singh waved, desultory and unaffected, inconspicuously attired, according to the fashion of the natives, in tones of steel and coal. He was tall and slim and dark as the bark of an ancient madrone tree. Singh was the chameleon in the madrone tree’s branches. He said, “Say, is that luggage ticking, old bean?”

“Hello.”

“Hullo. My, my, aren’t you lovely as a corpse.” Singh embraced him lightly, kissed his forehead. The dusky man wore heavy, foreign cologne. He gleamed unctuously. “Did you see the Tyrannosaurus on the first storey? Astonishing!”

Conrad extricated himself from Singh’s grasp, hefted the briefcase. “That isn’t a T-Rex.”

“Wot, wot?”

“Nothing. Shall we?”

“No rush. I’m on vacation. Let’s nip off to my flat. Not mine, it’s a corporate timeshare, but anyway. You look like you could use a drink.”

Conrad shrugged as if the suggestion meant nothing to him. His chest constricted and his breathing came shallowly. Red sparks dashed mini novas against his eyelids. “Lead the way.”

As they walked along the promenade, he was tempted to scan the surroundings for Marsh or whoever else lurked behind the potted plants. He didn’t quite dare. Singh would know.

My fly is open.

“You drive,” Singh said when they left the museum and stood on the sidewalk in the austere light of a gathering storm. Snow was possible. Meteor showers.

Is this a capture or a kill team? Is Singh black-ops? I don’t think so, but damn, maybe. Doesn’t matter; it all ends with a gunshot, a dose of something unpleasant from a syringe. DeKoon won’t be happy when I disappear. Unless he really was off his rocker about the Finn. Damn, maybe that was it. One strike and he called in the dogs. Or maybe he’s a member of the club. Forget it. Get your game face on. Zip your pants, idiot.

Conrad couldn’t detect any telltales that his car had been tampered with or searched. Then they were accelerating through the clean streets. Conrad was on automatic. He vaguely registered the myriad hyper-accentuated details—how a goodly quarter of the neon shop signs were in Korean or Thai characters; the bare-boned shade trees, stark and comatose; the lowering clouds, faceless as a mob; the flesh of his lumpen, knobbed hands had begun to wattle and wrinkle, blue-veins bulging as he clasped the wheel. The hair on his knuckles was gray. Tired skin, tired blood. A man could pump all the iron he liked, muscle got old sooner or later, Jack Lalann and Arnold notwithstanding.

“How did your conversation with Mr. Cardinal go?” Singh lighted a cigarette.

“He revealed the secrets of the universe.”

“The secrets of the universe are of scant interest to a brute such as yourself.”

“I wanted him to sign my vintage LP. He promised me backstage passes to a Neil Diamond concert.” Conrad hit the brakes to avoid colliding with a taxi. He seized the diversion to scan the rearview mirror for a tail. Lots of cars back there.

Singh braced his left hand against the dash. His hand was soft and sinuous as the weaving head of a viper. “Do you really take us for total morons?”

“I probably shouldn’t answer that one.”

“To blazes with your personal issues. Your bloody agenda is only permitted so long as it aligns with ours!” Singh’s face was tight. He relaxed with a visible effort. “You’ve been too obvious, too indelicate. You’re starting to attract enemies. I would not be surprised if MI6 is out for your balls after that brouhaha with the Honduran expat last year—what was his name?”

“Kimosa.” Conrad punched the gas, jarred Singh back in his seat.

“Right. Kimosa. I guess the fellow thought you’d come to cut his throat; raised quite a stink with the consulate, I gather. We just tied that to you—all very hush-hush, you see. How did you find him? Never mind, stupid question. Your sister did the heavy lifting, didn’t she. You just pitched cleanup on a bunch of worn down geriatrics. I doubt the majority of them understand what it is you think they know. His relationship to TALLHAT would’ve never occurred to me if we hadn’t confiscated those documents on the island.”

“So, Cardinal played for the Company. Lots of my friends do.”

“The booze hound was indeed a Company man.” Singh gazed at the stop and go traffic, loose-limbed and disaffected as usual. “Wicked stuff he got up to in his day, I must admit. The chap is from the old school—I’m shocked he didn’t pop off to his garret and down a cyanide pill after you forced him to divulge his secrets.”

“I didn’t force him to divulge anything. I asked nicely.”

“Did you get anything useful? He was never trusted with any sensitive information.”

“That’s what he told me.”

“Look, Conrad…something has happened.”

“No shit. I thought this was a social occasion.”

They left the metropolitan core, crossed into stark regions populated by grimy warehouse fronts, liquor stores and low income housing complexes stacked in concrete blocks.

It grew steadily dimmer, God’s thumb on the dial.

V

 

 

Conrad parked on the street and followed Singh up steps littered with pigeon droppings to a security door of the Wanderveldt Apartments. It was a tall conical building, a decrepit 1950s tenement riddled with tunnels and chambers like a termite colony in a grey stump. Singh thumbed the button by 203 G. MOTT and shortly, they were buzzed in without comment.

The foyer was damp and papered by dead leaves. A wheezing, shuddering elevator with brassy wall plates raised them to the third floor, deposited them in a claustrophobically narrow corridor that went on and on under a series of dim globes, many of which were broken out, or blank as glass eyes. Flies shrilled in the dark globes; tiny, damned souls searching for the light. Rough plaster walls were scarred by fissures, brown water stains and occasional jags of graffiti that almost made sense to Conrad if he regarded them from the corner of his eye. Voices seeped through the plaster, mingled with the complaints of the flies. Pipes groaned.

Singh knocked at 203 and waited. He pinched open a pack of Gauloises, stuck a cigarette in his mouth and offered the pack to Conrad.

“Thanks,” Conrad said, noting the many pizza delivery fliers before the door, an iris-dilation in the peephole. Sweat greased his face, made the briefcase handle slippery in his fist. He slowed his breathing, forced his neck to relax.

Singh lighted both cigarettes with a match from a small wooden box that he’d carried for as long as Conrad had known him.

“Un momento, por favor.” Locks rattled.

The door swung in to a darkened space, rich with incense, hash and underlying mildew. First Singh, then Conrad on his heel.

A blanket of jungle-ripe humidity smacked Conrad in the face. The door shut and it was full night, except for a sliver of light probing beneath the drapes of a window somewhere to the right. Ghostly classical orchestra echoed from another room. Brahms at work. Someone giggled—bubbly and feminine. The record skipped and began again.

“Don’t move,” Marsh said from the darkness behind Conrad and to the left. Phosphorescent green light bloomed. Marsh stepped around and played a crackling wand over Conrad’s shoulders, chest and extremities. Marsh resembled a hugely ursine airline security checker in cyclopean headgear and a Hawaiian flower print shirt and Bermuda shorts. He sweated Scotch in the sultry confines. “He’s good.” He snapped the wand off and Conrad went blind with green aftershocks.

Singh switched on a floor lamp.

The apartment was subdivided into a hive—Conrad counted four flimsy wooden doors and a curtain of beads. Each door had been painted a different color: red; orange; blue; and white. The outer area had been stripped to some open beer bottles, pregnant ashtrays and a folded laptop computer on the kitchenette counter; a sectional and a moldy phone book, but no phone. Near the balcony sliding door Mediterranean incense sizzled in an iron brazier shaped like a Buddha with pronounced incisors. Conrad wondered if they’d ripped the thing off from an art gallery or a museum.

Marsh unhooked his headgear, slapped it on the counter. He squinted and rubbed his blunt hands on his shirt. His stubbly head was something that should’ve rolled from a cannon barrel. “You got crabs, Singh.”

“Indeed? You are referring to the jet Cutlass, Nevada plates, number Alpha-Charley-two-two-oh-niner? I picked him up at the museum. He parked about half a block down on the west side of the street. Poppa Z’s goons, I presume. They seem quite proprietary regarding our friend here.”

Marsh regarded Conrad. “In the old days, we just garroted guys, or stabbed them with a poisoned umbrella tip. Things are too damned complicated. We got lasers; we got masers; we got nanoviruses and white frequencies that’ll short your cerebral cortex in one-one-hundredth of a millisecond. For instance —we got a killsat in synchronous orbit, keyed to your heat signature. Actually, it’s a Russian surplus geological satellite with minor tweaks; shoots x-rays into the ground so corporations can decide where to drill. The fact it’ll cook any organic life in its projection path is a happy side effect. You can smoke just about any bunker in the world with one of these puppies. It’s all in knowing where to point it. Wanna drink?”

Conrad leaned against the wall in the pale outline where a picture had hung. He didn’t trust his voice. He shook and dripped. His clothes stuck to him as if he’d strolled through a sauna.

“What’s with him?” Marsh grabbed Conrad’s briefcase, tossed it aside. “Going downhill fast, aren’t you, killer? Don’t look much like a world beater from where I’m standing. Good thing we brought you here for this little powwow. Things are getting out of hand.”

Singh rinsed a couple of glasses in the sink and a dumped scotch into each. He pressed one on Conrad. “Health!”

“Your liver’s got to be the size of a soccer ball. How’n the hell do you stay in shape to do what you do?” Marsh said.

It was an old question, Marsh’s notion of an icebreaker. Conrad drank his glassful, enjoyed the ephemeral bite, the transitory and finite thrill, like gasoline drying on pavement. Besides frequent visits to the Big Stage, how did he maintain his edge, his dominant physical power? Ask a crocodile, fat and torpid on its sunny clay bank how it stayed fit and deadly. Same answer would apply. “If you aren’t planning to snuff me, let’s discuss business.”

Marsh and Singh exchanged glances. Marsh said, “Snuff you? You thought—?” The big man laughed. His cheeks flushed and he hacked phlegm into a kerchief. “Oh shit, that slays me. You need to relax, son. Where do you think we are, Zimbabwe? Drama queen.”

“He was joking about the killsat—the cone isn’t that precise; we might get toasted as well. I would’ve just had one of our sniper associates do the deed at the museum. Far less messy. Here, let’s freshen that a bit, yeh. There’s a lad.” Singh poured Conrad another dose with a trembling hand.

Why was Singh nervous? Have I ever seen them like this? Conrad didn’t think so. Damn it, maybe they meant to kill him after the transaction, kind assurances notwithstanding.

Murmurs and a groan escaped the room with the Brahms. More giggling from beyond the white door. The humidity was thicker, stronger. Shadows swelled in the cracks and corners, began to rise in a tidal trough.

“Who’s here?” Singh gestured with his glass at the white door.

“Vonda. The hooker, remember? She got here a few minutes ago.” Marsh gave his partner a bluff and hearty grin that lacked conviction. A convulsion of the jaw and nothing more.

“Wanda?” Conrad said, chilled.

“Vonda.”

“Oh! Vonda. Yes, right then. Let’s hurry this along, shall we. It would be impolite to keep the lady waiting.”

“Yeah. Meter’s running.”

The lamp flickered and everyone stared at it. Conrad’s throat was tight again; his body felt too heavy, too full of sand and water. The room seemed to have gained several gravities.

“Time to get down to brass tacks,” Marsh said, as if briskness would dispel doom. “Here’s the score. This is the kiss off. You and us, we’re through. The operation has been terminated. The operation never existed. We don’t know anything about the underground battle royales, your crazy fucking sister, Project TALLHAT, nothing. We don’t know no Conrad, Conrad.”

“Fine by me. What’s the catch?”

“We’ll be out of your hair once we’ve squared accounts.”

“Squared accounts. What does that mean.”

“Means we needs must part,” Marsh said.

“And the shoe drops.”

“The deal is—you buy out our interest in your future enterprises, indemnify us against the possibility we lose a ton profit on account of your, uh, premature demise. Say, oh, five hundred grand.” Marsh patted the laptop. “We can handle the transaction right here.”

Conrad held up two fingers. “Okay, boys. I’ll go two-hundred even, and this had better be good. Not here. I don’t trust you that much, M. I’ll retreat someplace a tad more secure and wire your payoff.” Half a million wasn’t beyond his capability, but the last thing he wanted was to hand these two jackals enough money to cap him and disappear to whatever tropical paradise they’d been lining up since they were cadets at spook academy.

Even as Marsh opened his mouth, Singh cut in, “Jolly idea. Agreed. Agreed, Robert?”

Marsh shook his head in defeat. “Do you understand what kind of guy you’re messing with? I mean, really, truly, understand?”

“The Brazilian? He’s done some antisocial things—”

“Not him. He’s a patsy, a stooge—just like your daddy was. Ciphers for the real player, the wizard behind the curtain. I’m talking about Drake. Ambrose Zora Drake. Really should a told us about him.”

The jig was up, then. They knew everything. Probably not everything, but more than enough.“What’s to understand? Drake killed my brother and probably my sister. Because of him my mom blew herself to hell and my dad ended up in a nut hatch. I think that covers the episodes you missed.”

“Whoa, whoa. It’s always about baby Imogene, isn’t it, bud? I looked into all that. You poor dupe. Your sister… How can I put it, Singh?”

“Delicately,” Conrad said. He dropped his empty glass and straightened.

“Hey, we’re friends,” Marsh said. He and Singh casually sidled away from Conrad’s considerable reach. “I’m just saying, okay? She might not have given you the whole story. You’re loyal and that’s sweet. But she wasn’t spotless, she wasn’t exactly true blue. I’m not casting judgment—we all gotta eat. Sis hooked up with Lorca, who is quite a dubious character, then they took a hit of the Brazilian’s wonder drug and were never quite the same. She went to the dark side. Am I right?”

Conrad looked at the floor, felt the big vein in his neck throb. “Drake is alive. Really and truly.”

“Oh, that is affirmative,” Singh said.

“Drake was the brains behind the Brazilian. Drake probably owned the Brazilian since Souza enrolled in med school back in Eighteen-fucking-whenever.”

“Why are you afraid of him? Like you say, he’s gotta be older than Mengele. A has-been on the lam from everybody with a badge.”

“Guess again, Connie. Take as many guesses as you need, even.”

“You picked Jonah’s whale for an enemy,” Singh said. “Drake is far beyond the likes of us peasants.”

“An untouchable? Counting down until the ball drops in a Nazi retirement home?”

Marsh and Singh exchanged looks again. Marsh barked and poured more liquor. “Drake runs a show you wouldn’t believe. As for Nazis, well, same ballpark. He’s a satyr. He’s Caligula and de Sade and the Pope rolled in a ball. Frankly, I bet he could buy and sell the Vatican. Guess that qualifies him as an untouchable.”

“What if he’s a terrorist too?” Conrad said.

“Plenty of terrorist masterminds are good with Uncle Sam. As of this moment, mums the word from HQ. Drake definitely has friends in our government. Get the drift?”

“Drake indulges peculiar appetites and our chain of command is at least peripherally aware,” Singh said. “There are documents, pictures… I regret having seen them.”

Coming from Singh, that was saying a lot, Conrad knew. “I’ve heard things. So what. Another rich bastard with the usual kinks. I know the type.”

“Wrong, stud. Whatever you’ve heard, I promise that ain’t the half of it.” Marsh’s eyes glittered. “Nothing is going to see light of day in our lifetimes. Records of his activities have a habit of getting misplaced or destroyed. Don’t they, Singh?”

“Oh, yes.”

“People on high have dropped the cloak of darkness over his shoulders. It’s not unusual, happens all the time. bin Laden, Noriega, guys like that were on the dole long before they became public enemy numero Uno. In some ways, it gets worse. At least for you.”

Conrad was growing cold as the sweat dried and his senses found equilibrium. “Worse. What does worse mean?”

“Drake may be the wart on the ass of an extremely large toad. Surely you figured out he’s not unique.”

“Not unique?”

“He’s junior member of a peer group, the elite of the elite.” Singh lighted a cigarette. He sighed. “The Order of Imago. You’ve probably heard of it during your investigations. It’s one of those loudly whispered secrets—like the Masons and the Satanists, only more so. Powerful, powerful men. Tycoons, industrialists, Old World nobility. A wicked old-boys secret handshake society. We know it exists. We’ve met a member or two, heard some stories. They’ve established a few communes in remote areas. There’s one in Arizona and another in Southern California. Probably five or six others. Didn’t Imogene tell you?”

“Nothing specific. Wild talk.”

The men stared at him. Their faces were luminous as wax. Mummies. The liquid giggle floated from the bedroom and Marsh’s glance twitched that direction. His tongue distended slightly. He sported the lump of a burgeoning erection.

Singh said, “Why did you lie to us about your sister? You should’ve told us from the start who she was after.”

“What, and ruin a beautiful relationship.”

“Perhaps it’s our fault. We should’ve dug a bit deeper, should’ve understood this wasn’t just about Imogene. It all goes back to your father. He owed Drake everything, didn’t he?”

“I’ve always liked you, man. So, I guess I’m kinda sorry about this.” Marsh began to tremor. He looked like a man in the throes of palsy.

Conrad picked up his glass and filled it again. He noticed Marsh had reached into his Bermuda shorts, was stroking himself. “What does this group want? Aren’t you two even a teensy bit curious?”

“Dunno, bud. Cults aren’t my forte. I’m just giving you the Action News headlines…” Marsh’s eyes went dead and his face softened, lost animation. “Sorry, Singh. I’m done here.”

“Rob —”

Marsh wheeled and shuffled to the white door. He hesitated, shoulders heaving, before he shoved open a dark slot and bulled through. No music, no giggling, nothing. Vacuum sucked the door shut.

Singh said dreamily, “Bugger it all.” He wagged his head as if it weighed upon his neck. “Did you follow that trial of a certain naughty senator. Four or five years ago? The one they say raped the intern? I had the dubious pleasure of interviewing that sterling fellow. He’d made an exceedingly strange request during his interrogation. He demanded to speak with an intelligence operative, someone involved with national security. So, in I went. The senator mentioned Ambrose Drake as a benefactor. The senator is from the oldest money, colonial bluebloods in tall hats. Kind of guys who presided over the witch trials. He made this crazy claim his ancestors knew Drake personally.”

The floor lamp began to flicker rapidly.

Something fell. Two, three, four beats and the lamplight steadied. An ashtray had plunged to the floor, dumped its contents; the brazier rocked gently on its base. The red and blue doors hung open, revealing cavities.

“Singh. What’s happening?” Conrad had fallen into a half crouch, fingers spread in anticipation of violence. His terror was muted, muffled, as if this were a dream and the floor was quicksand and it was happening to someone else, someone on TV, perhaps, an actor rehearsing his wooden lines, standing on the X.

“You know.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”

Singh’s eyes were huge and dewy. Saliva gathered in the corner of his slack mouth. “Vonda is lonely.” He shuddered and removed his gaze from the white door. “So this hapless senator, the one with his neck on the block, swore that Dr. Drake was involved in, how shall I say, extreme occult practices. Decidedly anti-American practices. The senator claimed to have made a pact with Drake and friends in return for his celebrity status and all the fruits that accompanied such success. I relayed this story to my superior…expecting to get a laugh. Nobody was laughing. My boss quietly advised me forget what I’d been told. And I did.”

A pact.

Imogene had said it first, shouted it at him. The truth was heavy and it squirmed in Conrad’s mind. Barbs. God will eat us all.

Sudden vertigo and the squeak of neglected hinges interrupted Conrad’s train of thought. The white door had swung slightly ajar; the pitch blackness inside had grown solid and swollen and sprung its cage.

The room rippled at the periphery, distorted and elongated precisely as it might’ve if Conrad had eaten a massive dose of shrooms or suffered a nasty concussion. Pressure built upon his flesh and in his bones. Objects on the counter rustled; the laptop slid several inches. The room seemed to be listing by a few degrees, a cabin in a sinking ocean liner.

“Farewell, Conrad,” Singh said. “It occurred to me we owed you a parting gift, a token of our esteem as it were.” He took a small packet from inside his coat and handed it to Conrad. “I don’t recommend viewing these on a full stomach. Nonetheless, these disks contain all you’d ever care to know regarding the proclivities of Dr. Drake. Some in color.”

“Come here.” A female voice; a soft, sweet invitation that hinted of mysterious pleasure, of chocolate and peppermint, clamps and whips, a long, slow descent into the ultimate darkness of a sundew. “Come here, come here.”

The lamp dulled, dulled and reddened as a beam seeping through closed fingers. Marsh called, “Tell him goodbye, Leo. I need to show you something.”

Singh smiled beatifically. His shadowy face gleamed. “Goodbye, Conrad. See you soon.”

Conrad didn’t answer. He blundered out into the hallway and fled, following the swaying overhead lights. Someone kept calling his name.

Interlude

 

 

The first knockdown fight Conrad had was as a teenager and with his father.

Dad was a scary man. Big body, big brain, murderous temper. A scary man and a terrifying drunk. He was drunk most of the years Conrad knew him and the two seldom spoke. Dad took him aside after Mom crashed her plane and had a father-son type of chat in the cellar of their home in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains where they’d dwelt since Ezra’s death. The cellar was much larger than it appeared and housed a number of machines and assorted lab equipment. Dad spent the majority of his waking hours down there, experimenting, plotting, muttering and cackling to the rats and the spiders. Conrad would’ve rather had the conversation in the traditional venue—on a rowboat in the lake, fixing the junk farm truck, chopping wood, anything but the damned cellar. Unfortunately, the old man had become exquisitely paranoid in his dotage and didn’t like to hang around in the open lest somebody should take a shot at him, or swoop down and roll him in a carpet and rendition him to some middle eastern hellhole for questioning.

Dad popped the cork on a bottle of Bushmill’s and guzzled it, one bloodshot jaundiced eye fixed upon his son all the while. He set the bottle aside and wiped his mouth and said, You like to fight, Connie?

This surprised Conrad. He’d never been in trouble at school, never thrown a punch. Most of the kids liked him. Those that didn’t wanted to screw Imogene in the worst way and left her brother in peace for obvious reasons. The bruisers who didn’t want to fuck her were scared shitless of her. She’d socked one guy who got too fresh in the testicles with the cute little set of brass knuckles she hid in her purse. Those guys left Conrad alone too. On the rare occasion some fool decided to jump him, nothing exciting came of it. Conrad could absorb a golf club blow to the head and shake it off, just stand there and take a beating until the bully got too tired to swing. That scared people worse than Imogene’s brass knuckles and pointy shoes. Which, after messing with Conrad, they experienced close up anyway.

Conrad shrugged. He seldom spoke around Dad, except in shrugs and grunts, and monosyllables.

Dad said, You’re a special case. Some of my friends in the military would be most eager to get you in their clutches. Ever ponder a career in the Marines? See the world with the Navy? No? Glad to hear it, because I won’t allow it. Your mom would haunt me if I did. And he glanced around as if Mom lurked in the shadows, ready to pounce. Anyway, Connie. You’re special and life is going to become extremely interesting for you in the Chinese curse sense of the word. This family has always been afflicted with that kind of thing. It goes back to my ancestors and I’m sorry your mom and you kids got roped into the mess. The thing is, I’m sending you to live with a friend of mine in the Mediterranean. He’s got all kinds of connections. You’ll finish school and go on from there.

What about Genie? Conrad actually looked from his feet and into his father’s eyes.

She’s going to live with Auntie. I have high hopes for that girl.

Don’t separate us. I’ll stay with Auntie too. Conrad began to fidget mightily. Sweat ran down his neck.

Dad chuckled. First, you make Auntie nervous. Second, you and Genie are entirely too close. That’s what comes of letting Mother practice all that fucking New Age child rearing bullshit on you two—way too much confusion. Not your fault, but all the same, it’s best you kids see other people for a while.

Where is she?

Gone, man, gone. They’ll be on the road a while. Out of the country.

Conrad didn’t say anything. He nodded and tore an x-ray machine free of its mooring bolts and broadsided Dad, sent him crashing through a domino row of shelves. He didn’t use his empty hand because he was enraged, not suicidal. A fire started and Dad came out of the smoke, laughing and swearing, ready for murder.

They destroyed the cellar and then the fight moved upstairs into the main floor of the house and they destroyed that too. Dad lifted the the big stainless steel refrigerator and rammed Conrad, bulldozed the whole living room wall, and then they were in the yard, ripping apart the lawn, tearing up lawn sprinklers and whacking each other with them.

Conrad thanked god Dad was dead drunk, because it slowed the old man down a little. He threw some dirt in Dad’s eyes and while he yelled and blindly pawed the air, Conrad managed to tear the Citroen’s passenger door off its hinges. He raised the door overhead and slammed it down across Dad’s back. It took three tries, but eventually Dad stopped trying to get on his feet, and lay there, muttering. Dad eventually crawled over to the car and got a half-full bottle of scotch off the floorboard.

The two of them slumped on the ruined grass and drained the bottle and watched the house explode in a Hollywood-style ball of fire. Dad wiped a tear from his cheek and explained that Conrad was a special case because he’d been engineered via a cloning process and that his DNA didn’t derive solely from his loving parents, but there was other source material. Material of a basic, primitive stock, an atavistic stock. That was why he looked a tad more brutish than the other lads, and why he could wrench car doors off their hinges, and why he could probably regenerate a non-lethal gunshot wound to soft tissue in a few hours. Maybe they could test that hypothesis one day…

That was also the first time Conrad got drunk. It became a trend. Turned out Dad was right about the gunshot wounds, too.

 

 

 

Chapter Four

I

 

 

DeKoon’s men swooped in and plucked Conrad off the street as he limped out of a tavern in the industrial district a few minutes after last call. He saw them coming, decided that discretion was the valorous course, and went along for the ride in a big black limo.

DeKoon sat across the way, immaculate in his white suit and hat. A heavily painted girl in a see-through blouse cuddled him, her hand inside his jacket and circling. She wore peacock feathers in her tightly coiled dark hair and silver eye shadow. A man sat on either side of Conrad. They too wore nice suits and hats, black ones, and sunglasses. Another guy rode up front with the driver and at least two cars followed the limo.

“You appear remarkably improved since our last encounter,” DeKoon said. “Still, only three weeks until the ludus. Not long to prepare for what I assure you shall be a nightmare. The Greek is hell on wheels. And, of course, he’s bringing some associates and pets. A pity for you.”

“Three weeks is an eternity,” Conrad said.

“Yes. You’re a special case. I said the same to Uncle K many, many times. We’ve made a small fortune on people underestimating you. You have the most remarkable endurance and fortitude I’ve ever witnessed. The ghost of Rasputin inhabits your skin.”

“Rasputin had nothing on me. I am going to slaughter the Greek, and his pets, and his associates.”

“I almost believe you.”

Conrad closed his eyes and tilted his head back so the blood and mucus drained from his sinuses down the back of his throat. DeKoon was correct, though—he felt far better than he had any right to. He said, “Uncle didn’t have any heirs. He left you the empire?”

“Let us say I’m the executor. I represent the spirit of his interests. Your incessant meddling with the greater powers that be alarms me and conflicts with said interests. It has to stop.”

“Been talking with my spook buddies.”

“Those two are bad eggs, Conrad. You really should get shut of them. They can’t help you. They are doomed.”

“I suspect our arrangement has run its course,” Conrad said, remembering the sweetly evil voice of the woman, the cloying darkness. “Why the hell are we having this conversation? Unless you hadn’t noticed I’m pretty goddamned drunk. My face hurts. I could use some sleep.”

“Where is the woman you were with the other night?”

“Which one? Nah, I’m kidding, they’re all the same. They come and go.”

“My advice to you is to pursue asceticism and celibacy, at least until after your match. Strange women are no friends to a man such as yourself.”

“Thank you. I’ll shoot the next one who tries to hop into bed with me.”

DeKoon smiled coldly. “It’s like this. The Pageant is a lucrative hobby, a diversion. You are a tiny part of that diversion. I never shared Uncle K’s familial regard for you. The scrutiny from one such as Dr. Drake is so unwelcome, despite your entertainment value, I’m tempted to have you diced so fine you could be sprinkled over a goldfish bowl. End of problem.”

Without opening his eyes, Conrad estimated the angles of his shoulders and elbows relative the vital organs of the men who bracketed him. Both of them had their hands in their pockets, ready to draw pistols. He didn’t like their odds in the confines of the limo. “Then why don’t you?”

“Because I received a package this morning—an exquisite birch hamper of the sort used by the daimios of feudal Japan. The hamper contained several items, including a handwritten missive penned upon obscenely opulent vellum. The details are tedious. The gist was, you are not to be pureed or otherwise molested. The package was sent compliments of one R. Lorca; your sister’s lover. My nephew’s severed head nestled inside the box and the letter was inserted into his mouth. I am of the distinct impression the lad died quite painfully and in much terror. The threat to my remaining family seemed implicit.”

“Well,” Conrad said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks, old chap. As I said, Uncle K was very fond of you. He feared you would come to a bad end. Personally, I hope you do. The sooner the better.”

“Been one of those days,” Conrad said. “Nobody loves me anymore.” And he chuckled.

The limo slowed and stopped on the corner where they’d originally nabbed Conrad. “Your sister is dead,” DeKoon said. “We would know if she were among the living. This phantom that teases you with ciphers and notes and well-placed rumors isn’t her. You are in a web, Conrad. The spider is coming.”

II

 

 

Connie, come to the house. Hurry. The note appeared in an email from Imogene’s old account, but he knew in his bones it wasn’t her who pushed send. He didn’t care because the beckoning plea aligned with his mood of desperation and a conclusion he’d already reached. The only place left to go was the one place the poets said a man couldn’t: home.

Three days of steady driving got Conrad across the desert and the mountains and sent him along the shadowy Oregon coast and into Washington—it had been years. He looked over his shoulder the entire way, hypnotized by the chain of headlights in his rearview mirror, wondering how many of them belonged to Dr. Drake, the NSA, or whatever sinister forces were aligned against him.

He spent a night in Olympia at the Flintlock Hotel. He could’ve gone the extra couple of hours to his ultimate destination, the abandoned family home on the Peninsula, but despite his strength and experience with mayhem and death at the hands of brutes and the claws of beasts, he feared the dark. The darkness of the Olympics at night was particularly oppressive—the ape in him responded to it with bared teeth.

Courage bolstered with a half bottle of whiskey, he opened the package Singh had given him at their farewell rendezvous and viewed the disk on the room computer. There were hundreds of files containing government aerial and satellite surveillance photos, a few motion picture clips, mostly ancient, and primarily concerning remote military installations in regions such as Mongolia, the Amazon Basin, Siberia, and Afghanistan. He kept clicking, certain of where it would lead, certain of what was coming—this was similar to the material he’d retrieved from Imogene’s caches, except for a handful of files buried deep in an unmarked subfolder. These last, labeled CLOISTER c. 1982-83, were muted surveillance feeds of Dr. Drake’s Pyrenees sanctuary.

First, a steady stream of images from the main grounds, then disjointed pictures of the interior corridors, culminating in a two minute recording of events in a large hall. Dozens of children were seated upon the floor in small groups. A pair of braziers smoked and blazed upon a dais at the fore of the assembly. The overhead lights dimmed and then the hall was illuminated by the shifting flames. Two figures entered the room and ascended the dais. Their features were hidden by cowls. Perspective was unreliable, yet the figures appeared freakishly massive, slightly bowed so the crowns of their hoods didn’t scrape the ceiling. They lowered their hoods and Conrad recognized both faces, before the faces changed and became something other than human. The children panicked and tried to flee. Apparently the doors were locked, because none of them escaped the hideous fate that awaited.

Conrad watched the proceedings twice. He removed the disk and snapped it in half and sat for a time, thoughts null.

Olympia’s tree-shaded streets were almost empty at dusk. He bought a steak dinner at a restaurant down the street, then drank a couple of beers in the hotel lounge; nothing stronger because he’d decided to at least attempt a pretense of professionalism. The lounge was a cozy, mirrored enclosure, lightly populated as it was a weeknight, and mostly by tourists. A blonde and a brunette who could’ve been sororal twins perched on the leading edge of the bar where the light illuminated them to best advantage, reduced their surroundings to a background blur. The women wore vintage 1960s dresses and vintage 1960s eyeglasses, slippers and stockings. Probably Evergreen coeds. They sipped mixed drinks in tall glasses and watched him while pretending not to. He bought them another round and one thing led to another and he learned it wasn’t his animal magnetism alone that attracted them, but the fact they were hooking their way through college.

Later, the trio lay tangled on his bed. He sprawled naked on his back and listened to them breathe. Light from the street illuminated the sleeping women, their soft, white curves, his dark and brutish hands draped against that pallid flesh.

The phone rang as he’d known with an unerring instinct that it would. The line hissed. He felt the weight of a presence on the other end. He said, “Is it you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” she said into his ear.

“Are you alive?”

“Are you?”

He squeezed the sumptuous ass of the brunette. The woman groaned and tucked her forehead against his chest. “Yeah, looks like,” he said.

The voice on the phone said, “You met the Brazilian. You took a hit. Jesus! You’re shining like a klieg against the old psychic skyline.”

“I followed your instructions. Watched the films, memorized the triggers. Something’s happening. I’m not certain what.”

“Caterpillar to butterfly, baby.”

“Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?”

“Depends, Connie. The Brazilian’s serum is bad juju. All those Rorschach patterns and evil home videos are also bad, bad juju. Mind-fuckery of the highest order. Put ’em together and it’s a recipe for a mini singularity. You gotta be of a certain genetic predisposition to survive and thrive. Our family tree possesses the recessive genes that react and activate. When this shit you’ve done to yourself finally kicks in for reals, it’ll be the biggest motherfucking trip you ever been on. Those dress up battles of yours… No human will be able stand against you. No beast will lay a paw on you. We’re talking godhead in a needle, brother.”

“Well, sort of sounds all right, you put it like that,” Conrad said.

“Sure, except that your change is a beacon to much bigger fishes cruising the deeps. You know who wants to eat you. He will eat you. Just like he munched Ezzy. Just like he munched thousands of others. He’s been around since before the ice covered the Earth. Doing his wicked deeds, striving to get larger than large. He eats the strong to get even stronger, and to eradicate the competition. He has to, because as big and terrible as he’s become, there are worse. There are frightful things beneath the mountains, beneath the oceans, beneath your bed. Things even the devil himself fears.”

“Fuck Drake. You slipped him. He must have a blind spot.” When she didn’t answer, Conrad said, “Drake is a man. I know how to kill men.”

“His name ain’t Drake, and like I’ve been trying to tell you, he ain’t a man. You won’t be for long, either. Nobody who survives the serum stays human.”

“What about Dad?”

“He didn’t take it. You see, the alchemical formula comes from Drake and Souza, which is akin to Satan handing the Apple to Eve, or Prometheus teaching some Greek how to make fire. For them, the inkblot cards and the serum are trappings of science designed to enthrall and enslave modern minds. A charade of rationality. Drake could simply breathe on you and transform you at the cellular level. He could snatch your brain and show you some cosmic horror that would turn your soul black. The Drake Technique is a joke, the mechanical rabbit greyhounds chase. And when Dad glimpsed the true nature of Drake and Souza, when he realized he’d made a deal not with high priests of a demon cult, but the fucking demons themselves, he opted out. Hilariously enough, he sent you to train with Kosokian, never cottoning to the reality that Uncle K was another of the diabolical set.

“I’m sure Drake had a good laugh at Dad’s expense. He loves games. That’s why you’re still alive. Oh, and because he’s swollen to such gargantuan dimensions he doesn’t get around much. He’s got plenty of servitors…and if one of his agents drags you to the master’s lair, you’ll be sorry.”

“Kosokian is involved,” Conrad said. “He faked his death. He’s mutating.”

“Took you long enough to add two and two.”

“I caught on a while ago. Didn’t know what I’d caught on to, though.”

“Kosokian’s deathbed act is just a snake slithering out of its skin. Happens every few centuries after the first couple of cycles. Uncle K is a monster. Your patron has been on the scene for an eon or three. He’s mortal enemies with Drake, by the way.”

“There’s a video of him and Drake taking a walk on the wild side together. At the Cloister.” He swallowed bile at the memory of the images he’d witnessed. “Seemed like peas in a pod while munching on kiddies.”

“They’ve got rules of engagement. Fuckers plot to destroy each other, but still get together for tea and crumpets on occasion. Lonely being a god, you see. Whole world is against you. Nobody understands you except your nemeses. I figure there’s fifteen or twenty of these dark lords scattered around the world hatching their evil plans—three or four others are elsewhere in the solar system hiding in moon lairs. There’s a reason the Apollo program avoided the dark side of the moon, is all I can say. The really old ones like Kosokian and Drake hate each other like fire, but they don’t get it on directly too often. Nah, they fight proxy wars. How’s it feel to be a proxy?”

“I don’t get it. Kosokian is using me as a proxy? Kosokian’s lieutenant has been warning me off Drake.”

“DeKoon is a patsy. Renfield to Kosokian’s Count. Except, being a dupe, he doesn’t have a clue regarding the identity of his boss. Hapless bastard thinks he’s protecting Kosokian’s estate. Bet he thinks the master is really dead. Sad.”

“There’s more.”

“Yeah, there is. The real reason poor DeKoon doesn’t know shit, is Uncle K likes to play mind games. Drake, Kosokian, that ilk…they get a rush from sadism, inflicting terror, instilling confusion and dread. They don’t give a rat’s ass about hierarchal efficiency. Hell, half the reason these things even establish organizations is so they can torture and torment their minions. Their own personal larder. To eat, fuck, and cause suffering is their reason to exist. The simple pleasures.”

“Where are you?”

“Let’s just say this is a long distance call and leave it there.”

“I miss you.”

“Yeah, me too. It’s nice hearing your voice. But you gotta forget me.”

“Not a chance, sis.”

“This is goodbye. My situation is… Let’s say it’s not pleasant. Raul tried to kill me and he may as well have considering where I jumped to. When that knife went in I didn’t stop to ponder, I reacted, made a leap across time and space and like the ol’ bottle, went round and round and stopped here, in this place, and I’m stuck. One way trip, folding the fabric of the universe to beat a hasty retreat. See, going back in time is actually to travel forward, which is the way the river flows. There’s no swimming against the current. I don’t want you to get into a similar fix—and you will, you keep fucking around with the ineffable.”

“C’mon. You left the clues. You want to be found.”

“Gonna rescue me, Connie? You’re a sap. I love ya, man. Ain’t gonna happen, though. Frankly, I never thought you’d actually track me down. You’re a resourceful dude. You need to realize, I’m not the one who’s fed you the tidbits lately. I quit a while back, once I realized you couldn’t save me…what would happen if you did. Raul’s had you on a hook for a while now. You’re getting played, fool. My former fuck buddy has a bone to pick with our family. He’s on the hunt for you.”

“Jeez, sis. What’s a guy to do then?”

“Get on your horse and ride into the sunset. Avoid that fight in the desert. The forces of evil ‘TM’ will be watching. Go underground. Cash in whatever you’ve got squirreled away and retire. Live like a king on that island. Forget me. Forget Ezzy. Forget us all. This is an elevator ride to hell, bro.”

“I love you.” He didn’t know what else to say.

There was a long pause before she said, “One more thing. The house is dangerous. Don’t go there.”

“A trap?”

“Yeah. Dark side of the moon. Lose the girls. Do that soon.”

“What girls?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Connie. Someone sent two of them, didn’t they? The brides of Dracula you fucked tonight? In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve attracted groupies like flies lately. Not to burst your bubble, but you ain’t that cute. One of your enemies has thrown these devil bitches at you for months. They ain’t what they seem. They’re decoys sent to spy on you, drain you, weaken you for the kill. You’re getting to be a beast, so Drake or Kosokian sicced twins on your sorry carcass. Don’t even dream you can handle that kind of action if it gets rough. Another thing. My amigo Lorca is probably lurking nearby. You see that motherfucker, start shooting, no questions asked. Meanwhile, scram.”

“I’ll try,” Conrad said. “Sorry you and the boyfriend had a falling out.”

“Remember, time is a ring. Don’t go near the house. But, if you do, watch your ass.” She hung up.

“Who was that, baby?” the blonde said, nails digging into his arm. Her eyes were large in the dimness. She nuzzled his shoulder and fastened her lips to his flesh.

“Yeah, who was that,” the brunette said. She’d swiftly raised her head in the manner of a predator. Her eyes were also very large. She dipped her chin and licked his nipple.

“An old flame,” Conrad said. “Go to sleep, girls.” He concentrated, visualized waves of lethargy radiating from his core. The women yawned, relaxed, and soon were snoring. He watched the light from the streetlamp thicken to red, and after a while, he extricated himself and dressed and left the women muttering and snarling in their sleep.

III

 

 

The two-lane highway wound through forested mountains. As the sun rose, he turned onto an unmarked dirt lane and eased along the overgrown track for nearly a mile before entering a field. The Navarro family home lay near the center of the clearing, rebuilt shortly after the tragic fire during Conrad’s teenage years—a two story wooden structure with a peaked slate roof, walls painted in shades of green and brown. The government had picked up the tab, sent in an army of contractors and laborers, and the whole building was restored in weeks like the phoenix from its own ashes. Conrad had watched this miracle of industry and finally grasped that his father was involved in some heavy duty shit for the powers that be to take such an interest in his welfare. Imogene rolled her eyes at this epiphany. She’d said, Late to the party as usual, you big, dumb bastard, and smiled sweetly and punched him in the arm.

He parked near the front porch. He fastened a cestus with two inch spikes to his left hand and forearm, strapped knives to his belt and ankle. The yard was overrun with weeds and grass. Moss clumped on the roof, vines dripped from the eaves. He smoked a cigarette and watched the golden light spear through the surrounding trees and ripple across the grassy field. By contrast, the dark windows of the house were cavities, pits.

The spare key was hidden in a coffee can covered in leaves at the end of the porch. He unlocked the front door and stepped into the foyer and smelled its closeness, the rich, mildewed damp that pervaded such long-neglected habitations. Lamps glowed in alcoves here and there, but the house was otherwise steeped in dusty gloom. Conrad bowed, inhaled, and concentrated. As if his consciousness dilated and partially detached from his body to float along the hallways of the building, he gradually became aware of every bolted door and sealed nook, every minute vibration of scuttling termites and flaking plaster. Mice foraged in the cellar, the hundred-fold cabinets and closets. Spiders hung like opals in their webs. Mold bloomed on the sills. But this was the sum of organic life present. None of the Honorable Opposition lay in wait for him. He was utterly alone.

Conrad had left home for good on his eighteenth birthday when he walked down the drive to catch the bus for the airport and his decade-long sojourn in Crete. Glancing at the austere furnishings reminded him that they’d lost the last of their familial history on the day he’d fought Dad and the house burned. The paintings and knick-knacks, the photo albums, Mom’s library…all reduced to ash and scattered across the field and among the fir trees. This place was a rotting shell. He knew instantly that Imogene had never come back either; the only familiar human scent belonged to Dad and that too was stale as the collecting dust.

The cellar door and surrounding surfaces were forged of steel beneath the walnut paneling. The lock was secured by an electronic keypad. Dad hadn’t shared the combination and it was doubtful with his eidetic memory that he’d bothered to write it anywhere. Conrad briefly pondered smashing the door with a sledgehammer from the garage, or trudging out to a mining supply company for dynamite. Both options were problematic for a variety of reasons owing primarily to laziness and his abiding disquiet about staying too long in the house. Without focusing, he typed a random sequence of numbers and the door slid open. The numbers were simply there and he had understood without conscious thought that they would be. Cool air rushed forth. He flipped a wall switch and a series of naked bulbs caged in iron lattice illuminated intervals of the stairwell that curved downward into gloom.

Dad’s experiments were congealed in beakers and tubes and Petri plates. In his day, he’d spent as much time crouched watching ants moil in the dirt as he did peering into a microscope or at a computer monitor. There were as many tracts and tomes of philosophy and folklore upon his library shelves as treatises of medicine and chemistry. The elder Navarro had believed, as did the ancient philosophers of the Far East, that the cosmos ultimately revealed itself as a repeating pattern, an infinitely replicated superstructure contained and embodied in a galaxy, down to a drop of blood.

Poking through the maze of rusty, dusty equipment, overseen by murky photographs of Tesla and Einstein, Conrad missed the crazy, ruthless old drunk. Unfortunately, this abandoned lab was no Fortress of Solitude and Dad hadn’t been any kind of Jor-El. There wouldn’t be a journal or a stash of secret recordings to lay his innermost thoughts bare, to offer a pearl of wisdom or an oblique symbol of rapprochement. There was only dust and rust and bad memories.

The center of the laboratory was empty space amid four support beams. The rest of the room was cluttered. This inefficiency was inexplicable. He studied the concrete, its patina of water stains, its chips, cracks, and concentric grooves that funneled into a shallow basin. He ran his fingers over each support beam, searching for the hidden switch, the concealed button, his inquiry guided by intuition and cynicism. The inward face of each beam bore an inscription that together formed a quartet of glyphs obscured by a thin coat of plaster. The beams were of basalt. Dad had had them trucked in special. Conrad didn’t recall any carvings, but obviously Dad got funky after the kids left the nest. The stains on the floor weren’t from water, either. Too dark, too ominous. He hung his head. “Oh, Pop. What have you done?”

Spilled a few drops of claret to propitiate the black gods, what else? the ghost of Imogene whispered. There’s a vicious dagger stashed in a drawer somewhere. Look at those Tesla coils, those tuning forks. He was trying to open a door in space and time with vibration and sympathetic magic. Whatever came through would be famished, natch…

So Dad really had been a magician, a sorcerer, corrupted by his association with Kosokian and Drake and the Great Dark they represented. Imogene was right about everything. He sent me and Genie away. Maybe he possessed a shred of decency. Maybe he wasn’t all bad. He wanted to believe that, but he also recalled Uncle K’s oblique comments regarding Dad using Genie as a weapon and holding his remaining son in reserve. That didn’t strike Conrad as particularly wholesome. No, my preservation is just another kink in a plot only Machiavelli could truly appreciate.

“Ah, we meet again.” Dr. Raul Lorca detached from the inky backdrop and stood directly beneath one of the lamps so his emaciated figure was striped in shadow. He wore a handsome suit and his hair was dark and soft upon his collar. Conrad estimated Lorca to be of early middle age, despite his sallow flesh, its tightness across his jaw and cheeks. Elegant and a refined in a vaguely aristocratic fashion, it wasn’t difficult to see why cynical Imogene might’ve been smitten. She’d always fallen for the worldly types; at least for a ride or two. Lorca glanced at the posts and said, “My, my. A summoning circle. Dr. Navarro was conjuring demons with the blood of babes, eh? Quaint.”

“Hi, Raul. Last time we talked you were fucking my sister. I got a feeling I liked you better then.”

“You’re too jealous of Imogene to truly like any man. On the subject of procreation: I to understand you were a test tube baby.”

“Somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning,” Conrad said. He slid a foot to his right, putting a table of beakers between himself and Lorca. “I was carried to term by Mom. That makes me a real boy, huh?”

“Who donated the material?”

“Kinda personal.”

Lorca smiled apologetically. “I confess, the questions are rhetorical. Imogene told me everything, although I don’t think she knows the half of it. Your father combined his material with that of at least two distinct species. Early Homo sapiens, possibly Cro-Magnon, and something much older, a DNA strand only a select few have encountered. A missing link, unless I miss my guess. The fascinating question would be, where did he acquire these cells. As that psychopath Kosokian is your patron, your father was also nurtured by a powerful man. Granted, they became enemies once your father ultimately grasped the enormity of the being he’d allied himself, its arch plan to enslave the planet. Meanwhile, Dr. Drake procured the cells because he had a tremendous interest in witnessing the birth of a superman, knowing full well you’d become his servant one day. Unlike mere mortals such as Imogene and myself, you were unique prior to Blooming. The serum simply sped the process along. Now…”

“I’m not a flower.”

“Yes, you are. A poisonous night-blooming flower. How else could I have winded your scent and flown here to greet you? You snatched every clue I laid down for you, my brutish sleuth. You would Bloom or die. Simple.”

“Did Drake send you to fetch me?” Conrad said.

“Heavens, no. He’d either make me a thrall or devour my essential salts if I were foolish enough to come near him. Your sister wished to kill him, foolish girl, while I simply desired the secret to immortality. I’m my own man with my own designs and I’ve hunted you for many moons, as the indigenous types say. It was very difficult to bide my time, to wait for you to fruit.” Lorca tilted his head and smiled shrewdly. “I wonder—what on Earth did you give Souza in exchange for your shot? Imogene and I bartered a veritable pound of flesh to receive ours. The Brazilian is wholly Drake’s creature. More than human, as it were. Drake inducted him to the immortality club ages ago, made him a chief servant. As I said: I shudder to speculate what Souza extracted from you in return for his precious elixir. Come, won’t you level with an old family friend?”

“You didn’t like Dad.”

“Lucky guess.”

“Nah. I see those rows of genteel shark teeth and think, this guy is a predator. He only opens his mouth for one reason.”

Lorca clapped in merriment. He shook his finger at Conrad with mock rue. “I confess. I hated him. Dr. Navarro killed me when my name was Enrique Valdez. He thought he killed me, I should say. I was revived and given a new identity, a new face. Those bastards at the CIA actually slotted me right back into your father’s department. This was about five years after I recovered from surgery and learned to walk and talk again, learned to answer to Raul instead of Enrique. The cretin never caught on. Every day I thought of murdering him, oh yes. I longed to repay him for ruining my face. He’d burned it with acid. Such exquisite agony. The plastic surgeons did a credible job, but it always felt like a mask. Nearly drove me insane.

“Although, I’ve since reverted to my former countenance, if not my birth name. This is how I would’ve appeared if that lumbering ox hadn’t mutilated me. To Bloom is to gain ever increasing control over one’s molecular structure, one’s electromagnetic field, to reshape one’s form to fit one’s needs. It feels good to be myself again, if only superficially. It feels good to be immortal.”

“Shit, Genie was on the money about Dad murdering some poor schmuck, huh? So, you’re the poor schmuck. That’s an interesting tale. By the way, I’d rather you didn’t call my dad a cretin. Speak no ill of the dead and whatnot.” Conrad rolled his neck and shoulders, willed his muscles to loosen. He tried sending a cone of sleep at the older man, but the cloud dissipated and he couldn’t seem to concentrate on generating another. He said, “How come my dad tried to kill you anyway?”

“A long, complicated, and boring story. I stole a bit of research and funneled it to my government. Nothing to do with the Drake Technique, so-called. We were designing a bio-weapon based on small pox. He caught me red-handed. We struggled. I was no match for a giant like your father. Not in those days. How I would savor a chance to replay that scene today… Years passed. Here we stand. The father is dead, yet lives on through his son.”

“Imogene isn’t with you,” Conrad said to gauge his reaction. He slid another six inches toward the wall. “I take it Pop doesn’t live through her.”

“We’ve parted ways. A lovers’ quarrel, I’m afraid.”

“Let me guess. Since you didn’t join Drake or one of the other immortals I can only assume you intend to form your own powerbase. Man like you needs an army if he’s going to stick around. Sis wouldn’t have your superbaby, would she?”

“These dark lords are ruthless and cunning,” Lorca said. “The only way for lesser lights such as myself and your sister to survive their predation is to either hide or band together. She would not listen to reason.”

“She finally realized who you were, I bet.”

“Yes, all was revealed after we completed the cycle. She means me harm. She is an angry and vengeful woman. This animus must run in the family.”

“Where is the angry woman?”

“Far away, I dearly hope. Doubtless Drake has her in his clutches. She wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Forget her. I’m here for you, Conrad. You’ve accomplished much these past few weeks. Yet this a delicate juncture, despite any sensation of heightened prowess, you are exceedingly vulnerable. It wouldn’t do to have you wandering the countryside in your emergent state. Too dangerous.”

“I suppose you’re going to take me to the mountains, teach me the ways of the mystical arts.” Conrad gripped the edge of the table with his left hand.

Lorca drifted closer without moving his feet. He stood in silhouette and his form blurred and warped in the dimness, seemed to gather size and density—the impression of wings, an aura of a black halo. “Don’t you believe I want to help?”

“My old man did you wrong and died before you got to even the score. I also think you’ve done something to my sister. Not much chance of us being friends in either case.”

“Wrong,” Lorca said. His face had broadened, its bones thickened, the flesh gone waxen and hard. No longer quite human, but a creature feigning humanity. “You and I will be much more than friends.” Even as he spoke he accelerated toward Conrad, hands hooked into claws, lower body impossibly motionless. He’d gained nearly a foot in height. His mouth gaped black as an eel’s. He was the image of a diabolical being sprung from the page of some book of demonology.

Conrad flipped the table in the same instant Lorca moved, and Lorca batted it aside as if two hundred pounds of metal was actually a Styrofoam prop. Conrad dove and rolled and slung the throwing knife he kept in his jacket. Lorca flinched and the blade skipped off the bone just above his temple. A pearl of blood formed and Lorca kept coming. He grinned. His teeth were jagged and many.

“Is that why you hung around with Genie? Revenge?” Conrad bounced to his feet and managed to get another table between them. Lorca had eased back, coiled into himself for another strike, and was in no hurry. Obviously if the man couldn’t torment Dad, the only surviving male heir would have to do.

Lorca stopped. He pressed his thumb to the blood, studied it. “At first, yes. Once I realized what she’d stumbled onto, what your father and Drake had accomplished, I delayed my plans and assisted her in gathering the puzzle pieces. I grew quite fond of her, in fact. A shame. Although, it still amuses me that she didn’t catch on until the end. Like father, like daughter. She really had no idea who I am. Silly little girl playing with guns.”

While Lorca was talking, Conrad gathered his reserves and tried again—he visualized the man bursting into flames. It was a strange sensation, a psychic weight in the center of his brain, the mental analogue to pushing rope. Pins and needles stabbed the length of his spine and his vision blurred. He pushed harder.

“What are you doing, Conrad?” Lorca said. The wound in his head widened and blood poured in a rivulet, dripped steadily from his collar and splashed on the concrete floor. “You can’t win. This is a rigged game.”

“Genie seemed confident I could kill you.” Conrad had gone through the same fire as Imogene and Lorca. The man obviously possessed the ability to shift shape, to manipulate his mass and strength. Whatever he could do, Conrad could do, if only he knew the trick.

Lorca said, “Nonsense. Imogene is…it’s not possible that you’ve spoken with her.” The man leaped again mid-sentence. Conrad reversed tactics; he pulled the table toward himself and used it as a shield. Lorca raked it and steel shredded like tissue paper. Conrad plucked a ten inch sliver of shorn metal and stabbed Lorca’s neck, rammed it clean through the opposite side. As Lorca reeled, hand clapped to his leaking jugular, Conrad punched him in the ribs with the spiked cestus, then the kidney, driving into the blow with every ounce of force he possessed, which would’ve sufficed to shatter a cinderblock, to rip a hole through a wet sandbag, or rupture the internal organs of a normal man. Lorca uttered a gurgling cry, and back-handed Conrad across the cellar and into the wall. Conrad curled, knees to chin, the air slammed from his lungs. He wished he’d brought a gun, although that hadn’t helped Imogene, had it? His thoughts were unclear; the room dimmed to infrared.

The scientist grasped the steel sliver and pulled it from his neck. Blood spurted and foamed. His face and chest were thick with blood. He was unrecognizable. His right eye shimmered and glared from the gore; it burned like a coal. “Allow me to return this,” he said, and approached Conrad and caught his ankle and lifted him as a doctor hoists a newborn. Conrad scrabbled at the floor, trying to find purchase. He had a moment to consider whether anyone had ever gripped him with such animal strength, then the scientist stabbed him in the thigh with the shard and twisted.

Conrad didn’t scream, although he wished to. Imogene whispered, Jesus, bro. Didn’t you get your ass kicked the last time you came down here? He beheld her then: nude and lithe, pinioned near the apex of an obsidian pyramid that jutted from a mountain of skulls. Her arms were chained above her head and she shone brilliant as a diamond prism. Light beamed from her flesh—white, then red; a nova that wiped the image from his mind, but left an imprint on his retina.

He laughed.

Lorca dropped him in a heap and frowned. “What is amusing?”

“See, in a life or death struggle,” Conrad said, pausing to cough a bit of blood, “when your enemy starts laughing you don’t stop to ask why, you finish him before it’s too late. Too late, sucker.”

Lorca kicked Conrad in the ribs hard enough to make him writhe. The second kick was less forceful, and the third thudded from Conrad’s side without effect. Lorca stepped back quickly. Nubs of horns bulged from his skull and his breathing whistled and keened high upon the register.

Conrad had gone about this all wrong, projecting malice at an enemy who was prepared for such a gambit. Perhaps inward was the answer. He imagined himself whole and strong, imagined his flesh as iron, his muscles as cables, his heart a furnace. He imagined a keyhole opening. Streams of dark and light flooded into his mind like oil. He stood. Lorca swiped at his collar and Conrad slapped his hand away and grinned. His teeth felt large and sharp. His was the physical strength of a great ape. Three great apes. The joy of his rage was more powerful still.

“Damnation,” Lorca said. “You catch on fast —”

Conrad grabbed his throat and squeezed, felt the windpipe go, then the spine, and squeezed hard enough to snap a railroad spike, reduce a stone to gravel. With a renewed burst of vigor, Lorca jerked free and attempted to run. Conrad leaped and drove his knee into the small of the man’s back while yanking his chin up and to the rear until several large bones snapped. Lorca’s muscles convulsed. Then his tongue protruded and he was dead. To be safe, Conrad fetched an axe and chopped the corpse into several pieces. He loaded the remains into a barrel, doused them with kerosene and struck a match.

He rested on the front porch and watched the greasy smoke coil into the sky. His sense of triumph was tempered by the regret he hadn’t had the opportunity to torture Imogene’s whereabouts from Lorca. While he rested, the steel splinter spontaneously worked itself from his leg and clinked onto the ground where it smoldered and bubbled. A few minutes later the wound sealed itself to an angry red pucker surrounded by deep tissue bruises which rapidly faded.

There wasn’t even a scar.

IV

 

 

Conrad stayed in Vegas for the week preceding his showdown with destiny. DeKoon reserved a penthouse suite in the glitziest casino, provided him with a limo, guards, call girls, and an unlimited tab at the front desk. Conrad banished the girls. The gorillas in the mirror shades kept a respectful distance. A fearful distance. He sat lotus before a wall of glass that overlooked the desert. He stared into the distance and, when night fell, into the blackness between stars. That week every sunset was red, every night moonless.

On Saturday night DeKoon collected him and whisked him off to witness the heavyweight mixed martial arts champion of the world defend his belt in the trademark steel cage. The champion went down in the fifth round and as the fighter’s head bounced on the canvas, a few drops of blood splattered the breast of DeKoon’s impeccable white suit. The brunette on his arm squealed and dabbed it, then licked her finger as she smiled coquettishly and crossed her long legs. Conrad glanced at the crowd packed around the harshly illuminated stage: a sea of shadows fractured by camera flashes, its denizens hunched forward like carrion birds.

“Two of the most famous warriors on the planet,” DeKoon said, hand on Conrad’s shoulder, “and you could tear them apart, rip the stuffing from them. Likely at the same time. Couldn’t you? I’d wager anyone in our top fifteen could take these guys. What a shame the luminaries of the Pageant must toil in obscurity.”

“The wheel goes round. I’m sure the taste for real blood will hit the mainstream again one fine day.”

DeKoon glanced at the crimson-lipped brunette. “I think you’re on to something, my friend.” He leaned over and kissed her, savagely, possessively, and she grasped his hair and pulled him in. A pair of beasts feeding upon one another.

Meanwhile, doctors rushed to tend the fallen champion. The stage burned beneath a column of white light while all else faded to black. Imogene appeared again as she had at their house. She floated atop the column of light near the vault of the roof. She loomed, naked and glistening with blood and sweat, larger, by far, than life. Her wings beat slowly and crackled with fire. Like the archangel Michael, she carried a sword and its blade dripped flames that scattered into sparks as they fell toward the unheeding throngs below. She blew him a kiss as her body brightened and flared and disintegrated into the darkness.

Almost over, Connie. The brunette kept sucking DeKoon’s face. She winked at Conrad. Her eye glowed with the reflection of the stage lights.

V

 

 

The cargo hold of the helicopter was windowless and lighted by a red bulb in a plastic case. Conrad sat alone in the cavernous hold and listened to the rotors churn. He had no idea what coordinates the pilot bore him toward, only that it would be a remote and deep desert location where death and glory awaited.

He slept and dreamed of being trapped inside a cave, of cowering in animal terror while beyond the mouth of the cave twilight cloaked a primordial landscape. A terrible presence impended upon his hiding place. This bestial presence hunched until its crown of antlers scraped rock, and it chuckled and growled and reached for him, clutched him and drew him into the light. His flesh was shredded, his bones cracked, his blood poured down a ravening maw.

He awakened as the helicopter landed.

Engineers and laborers had further excavated a massive crater near the foot of some low mountains, reinforced it with granite pillars and entrenched amphitheatre style bench seats, with all the grandeur and scope of an ancient pyramid construction site.

Cold dusk had settled over the land. Floodlights glared from a ring of conning towers. Film crews positioned themselves atop strategic roosts along the rim of the crater. Several hundred spectators had assembled between granite colonnades. The guests were garish as peacocks in their collective attire. Men with automatic rifles patrolled the perimeter.

Conrad wondered, as he often did in the moments before a ludus of this size and complexity, how many millions of dollars had gone into the preparations, the construction, the bribery of God only knew how many law enforcement agencies and military personnel to steer clear, to divert attention and provide cover. Who were these pampered and pompous spectators? Foreign royalty, Balkan financiers, sons and daughters of Hollywood, of Washington D.C., the bored and bloodthirsty scions of Western industry, and fake celebrities? Their identities were a mystery, for the organizers of the Pageant scrupulously enforced a policy of non contact between athletes and patrons, but the crowd’s desire was plain; that desire charged the air.

Adrenaline smoked in Conrad’s nostrils, his lungs. He’d stripped naked in the belly of the chopper and donned his harness of battle, the boots and plumed helm; armed himself with a brace of pila, the cestus, and a gladius meant for chopping men to small pieces. He needed little else.

Pageant attendants escorted him to a staging area where he was consulted by a tight-lipped surgeon and a team of assistants. Conrad was offered an impressive selection of pills and injections—drugs to pump him up and inure him to pain, or drugs to sand down the edge and keep him calm, depending upon his strategy for the battle. He declined and sent the medics packing. DeKoon waved from the curve of a pillar a few yards away along the crumbling lip of the crater, then leaned back into the shadows and Conrad was alone. He regarded the stars while announcements crackled over speakers, introducing the main event of the ludus in several languages.

A youth, dressed in a toga and wreathed in laurels, came to lead him down the many steps into the pit. The boy warned him to watch his step on the final landing and the sandy floor of the arena proper. There had been a number of earlier matches, including an extremely messy battle royale between two dozen convicts flown in from various international prisons. The custodial crew could only do their best.

Oiled posts were driven into the ground at irregular intervals, torches socketed into the crowns. The resultant light was smoky and dull and his shadow stretched long and grotesque across the sand. Horns winded, deep, primal tones that raised the hairs on his body and vibrated in the soles of his feet.

Silence fell as the horns died and the announcements ceased and the crowd held its breath in anticipation of carnage.

The Greek’s retainers awaited; elderly and vile twins, dressed in soiled loincloths. Conrad recognized them as Uncle Kosokian’s creepy servants from the estate. One beckoned and dragged his nails across a stone outcropping and struck sparks. Conrad followed them away from the expectant eyes of the crowd, its burgeoning murmurs of unease and discontent. The ancients led him into a cavern that reeked of spoiled blood and charred meat.

The Greek lolled upon a throne fashioned from a pile of animal hides and armor and the shattered bones of men. More torches hissed and sputtered from crevices in the walls. Smoke tinged the air red as the heart of a stoked furnace. “Good to see you,” Uncle Kosokian said. He had grown to the immense proportions of the giants from Conrad’s nightmares; easily the height of three men standing upon one another’s shoulders. He wore nothing except for a crown of obsidian spikes and a necklace of bloody skulls. Sweat poured from his cockles and dewlaps. He sucked marrow from a cracked femur and tossed it atop the growing pile. The ancients scuttled to positions at the base of the throne, where they hissed and made signs of obeisance to their master.

Conrad’s knees quaked. His gladius fell from his hand and clattered upon rock. He said, “My, what big teeth you have, Uncle.”

Uncle Kosokian’s chuckle reverberated ominously. “Like certain Caesars of yore, I can’t help but descend into the arena for the occasional bit of sport. I know, I know, it’s unfair, undignified and a trait often derided in the illustrious. Regardless, nostalgia is undimmed by enlightenment. As a mortal, I was quite expert in the dispatch of my fellow man. To be deprived of a direct hand in such gory spectacles is a high price for godliness.”

“What does this mean? Am I to be enslaved? Eaten?” Conrad could still hear the children at the monastery screaming, could see them scooped into the slavering maws of monsters. This guise of Uncle Kosokian, albeit distorted to mythical dimensions, was yet a humanoid mask of his true self. Its true self was likely more accurate. Uncle K was a man by the thinnest definition only.

“I lied about many things, Conrad. My fondness for you is nonetheless genuine. Tonight is a celebration. You stand at the threshold of transcendence. You are of the primal stock, my son. The missing link between man and animal, your cells scraped from the soft sponge at the bottom of a pond when all the Earth was muck and amoeba. You possess a purity that none alive can match—not me, nor Drake, nor your sweet, lost sister. In a few eons, when your strength has grown, you will rise to gobble up your enemies and take dominion of this ball of dirt.”

“And Imogene?”

“Stubborn, stubborn boy. Assuming by some miracle she wasn’t captured by Drake as a thrall, or murdered by that wretch, Lorca, then by all means, take her as your queen, your slave, your whatever. None of my concern.”

Conrad half-listened to Uncle Kosokian, mesmerized instead by a sudden transformation of the ancients from wizened men to a pair of the taut, voluptuous women he’d known in a dozen incarnations over the past months. Rhonda smiled with lascivious glee and Wanda tipped him a wink and thrust her hip at an exaggerated angle. Smoke shifted a veil across these apparitions and as it drifted, they were scabrous trolls once more, snickering at his expression of horror.

“My apologies,” Uncle Kosokian said. “Think of them as hobbles…impingements upon your running amok, drunk with power. Pleasure instead of imprisonment. My servitors meant you no harm. Quite the contrary—they disposed of those two baboons who’d been extorting you. Marsh and Singh were into wet work. Sooner or later one of them would’ve decided to cut your throat in case their superiors decided to investigate. I couldn’t permit such a fate to befall you.”

“No,” Conrad said, and a multitude resided in that utterance. He gritted his teeth and composed himself. “And here we are. The guests will be pissed when there’s no fight. We’ll be ruined.” He smiled bitterly at this last.

“The guests? Provender, my boy. Grist for the mill. In a moment I shall make a minor adjustment to you that you might transmogrify into an astonishing and horrific creature of legend and then we’ll shamble forth and devour them where they recline. Kicking and screaming.”

“That sounds absolutely delightful.” The voice was soft and urbane and Conrad recognized it as Dr. Drake’s. Eyes burned molten red in the darkest corner of the cave at the heart of a column of shifting darkness. The column gathered height and mass, billowing upward and outward with silent menace.

“Damn you Ambrose,” Uncle Kosokian said, lurching to his feet, which was a frightening sight. “This is my demesne. You are trespassing in violation of our covenant. Begone!”

Dr. Drake said, “I am aware of our arrangement, Cyrano. Alas, I am compelled by reasons of appetite and paranoia to abscond with the young man. Surely, in your wisdom, you knew I’d come for him tonight.”

“I rather hoped you’d show a bit of restraint. There will be repercussions. You’re ruining the lad’s debut.”

Dr. Drake emerged from his roiling cloud of blackness. He was as Conrad remembered: frail and bald with a hook nose, his lips perpetually curved in a sardonic smile. He dressed simply in a dark shirt and slacks. “Greetings, Conrad. It’s been positively ages. How’s your sister, eh? Hold tight and we’ll be off for a conversation of cabbages and kings, my little oyster.” To Uncle Kosokian he said, “Hand him over, Cyrano. All is not lost; you can still eat the folk awaiting their bread and circuses.”

“Get behind me, Satan.”

“We must destroy him. I’ve never witnessed such acceleration, such raw potentiality. Had I suspected… Let’s say I’d have taken measures. Call it a failed experiment, hubris. If we hesitate, he’ll become too strong. We must act.”

“But I am. The blood and bones of five hundred sheep will be his initiation unto godhead. The boy will make a fine ally to my cause against you, old one.”

“The servant will become the master,” Drake said.

“Admittedly I fear you in your full aspect,” Uncle Kosokian said. He cracked his knuckles and rolled his shoulders as a prizefighter preparing for the blows to come. “However, you’ve overreached by appearing within my sphere. I say again, begone!”

“Don’t be a fool. I am sufficiently manifested to annihilate you and take what I wish.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, it’ll be bloody.”

“Do you promise?”

Galvanized by a nod from Kosokian, the ancients shrilled in unison like angry vultures and hopped toward the doctor, claws extended. Drake caught each man by the neck, midair. He smashed their heads together in a shower of pulp and cast the limp bodies against the cavern wall with such force their limbs detached and flipped end over end into the gloom. He wagged his finger at Uncle Kosokian and clucked his tongue.

Conrad stared with newly sharpened senses at the doctor, a kind of X-ray vision that bored through Drake’s façade. Drake’s flesh and bones flickered and rippled and Conrad had the sense of enormous fingers inserted into a puppet. Whatever plucked the strings existed partially upon another plane and across an improbable gulf; an entity that radiated malignant hunger and rage of scarcely conceivable scale.

“Run, Conrad. And remember the little people on the day of your return.” Uncle Kosokian stooped and brought a fist the size of a wrecking ball down onto Drake’s head with the evident purpose of driving the doctor into the ground as a mallet pounding a stake. The blow glanced aside without effect. Drake laughed and a thundercloud coalesced and swiftly descended to coil around the antagonists. Strokes of blue and yellow lightning licked forth and scorched rock, blasted sections of the floor into gravel. All of the torches snuffed at once and the cavern was cast into darkness.

Conrad took the opportunity to flee, his flight guided by the intermittent flashes of lightning. The earth shook and groaned and cracks opened in the ground and raced along the walls and thick, choking dust billowed forth. The curses and cries of the combatants rose to a tumult and became the death cries of mighty beasts, the roaring of calving glaciers, of collapsing mountains. He caught his heel on a stone and pitched headlong into a chasm of hot, whistling wind and blackness edged in dull red fire—

—and found himself kneeling in the courtyard of his Vegas hotel. Only, not precisely his hotel and not the Vegas he knew, not by a long shot.

The building loomed dark and silent, a mausoleum beneath the glittering desert sky. The entire city lay motionless, silent and sepulchral. A breeze rustled a flag on a pole. The stars were not right. Brooding emptiness crushed down with the weight of the universe itself. Conrad’s face was wet and he realized he bled from his eyes and mouth and nose. His blood mixed with flakes of ash and rust, and it tasted of antiquity and ruin. The moon slowly pierced the horizon and hung there, the blazing ivory tooth of a cannibal god taking a bite of the world.

His enemies would follow once they finished squabbling. He had to keep running lest Drake find and kill him. The problem was, he doubted there was any place on the planet to hide. It’s a one-way trip, Imogene had said. Forward to the end, beyond the end to the beginning. There would be no return. Actually, there’d be a return, it would just require several hundred million years of evolution.

It all felt so malleable, the moon, the stars, the night itself. He covered his face and concentrated, and discovered that there was nothing a bit dramatic about folding space and time. He allowed his mind to fill with the blackness of the illimitable void that surrounds the specks of dust that comprise the cosmos, and from this heart of darkness he summoned an image of his sister, pure and crystalline. Her image persisted for a moment before it wavered and dispersed. His vision dilated and contracted simultaneously, impossibly. In Imogene’s stead, something awesome and terrible shuddered, a stirring from the cosmic depths. He glimpsed a reflection of his own form, grown monstrous, elongated, distorted, all encompassing. A mouth, his mouth, yawned like a thousand black holes, eating planets, constellations, light, its own tail.

Dread overwhelmed him as the earth gave way and he was suctioned into the cathode of the universe, reduced to his constituent particles and absorbed.

VI

 

 

Conrad crawled from the soup and curled into a fetal position, gasping and wet with slime. He eventually opened his eyes to a lambent sun directly overhead. His unreasoning terror receded by degrees, although it lurked and his heart beat too fast. He lay supine on a mossy atoll surrounded by shallow, blood-warm seas. Steam drifted from the water. The sky was apple green.

“Behold the empire of trilobites,” Imogene said. She gleamed. “Hard to believe there’ll be little hominids skulking in yonder caves an eon or two down the road. Then flint and fire and dogs and rats. The adoption of gods and devils. Then, revenge, baby. Fiery, gory revenge. It’ll be great.”

“Something to look forward to,” Conrad said. He shivered violently, taken with a sudden chill. Contemplation of deep geological time wasn’t doing much to curb the fear in his heart, the wooziness of his brain. Nor did his sister’s dark smile lend him comfort. “I don’t know why I’m thinking of frying pans and fires…”

Imogene beamed her sinister smile as she reached up and casually grasped the sun and turned it counterclockwise as if unscrewing a light bulb.

A night without stars rolled over the world.

In the darkness, Imogene laid her cool hand upon his brow and her nails only dug in a little. She said, “Shall we begin?”

Table of Contents

Chapter One

I

II

III

Interlude

Chapter Two

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Interlude

Chapter Three

I

II

III

IV

V

Interlude

Chapter Four

I

II

III

IV

V

VI