“Public?”
“I mean he turned it into a franchise. International Church of Telos became Telos Incorporated. That must have been, what, ’87, ’88? Your dad appointed himself CEO. Can you imagine that? Head of the board during the week, and come Friday night he puts on his goddamn dressing gown and comes down here to be John of Telos, Ascended Master.” He shook his head and gave a laugh that sounded a lot like the cougar. He looked at Vivian seriously. “I’m not going to mince words, young lady, your father was a selfish son of a bitch. He cut Janek loose because he didn’t think he was pulling his weight. Then when Janek broke his NDA, your dad ruined him. Financially and otherwise. And I don’t just mean in court. Those initiates will do anything for the good of Telos.”
Vivian remembered the local paper that Janek Blucas had shown her – the burned-out house, the triumphant headline. Blucas had got what was coming to him, just like the members of the Telurian Mission, and however many others.
“Didn’t you want to help him?” she asked.
“Me? Back then I was making too much money to give a shit. Janek said he’d never talk to me again, and he was right to. Then, in a couple of years, your dad jettisoned me too. Heaved me over the side of the good ship Telos, right about when he went back to the UK. I had the good sense not to lose my money and my mind on a lot of legal nonsense.” He held up the cigarette, now not much more than a damp stub, and sniffed. “Say, boy, what is in this?”
“You’re still here, though,” said Vivian, before Troy could answer.
“Yes, ma’am, I am still here. Your powers of deduction are astonishing.”
He sniffed again. She just waited for him to carry on, rather than risk embarrassing herself with any more questions. Eventually he cleared his throat and spat something that looked like a whole oyster onto the floor.
“I left Telos and spent all my earnings and had a good old time. Twenty years of partying doesn’t do a lot of good for the soul, though. After all that, found myself back here, wandering California looking for something more spiritually fulfilling. The mountain called to me!”
He made an epiphanic gesture with his hands.
“Are you serious?” said Vivian.
“No, I’m not serious. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but someone needed to keep an eye on my brother. You know what that’s like, am I right?”
“He thinks you’re dead,” said Vivian.
“I’m dead to him, that’s for sure. Still doesn’t talk to me. I just go to his place sometimes and bring him food and blankets and such. Poor son of a bitch.”
“But why are you up here?”
“I ain’t living in town, no thank you. Don’t want anything to do with any of that. I see what the Telos thing has turned into and I tell you, with God as my witness, I am ashamed. It was different when we started. In the seventies there was a kind of optimism about it. It was fun being a hippy. I don’t know when it got so serious. Nowadays, these kids…” He flicked the butt into the fire and it made a small tongue of flame. “Like the goddamn Hitler Youth,” he said.
They sat in silence for a few moments.
“So there’s nothing up here? Apart from you?”
“I told you,” said Piotr. “Just me and the rabbits.”
“There must be something. Why do they keep sending people up the mountain?”
“No one gets sent up the mountain. They just come up here of their own accord, because they think they’re going to find the answer.”
“And what happens to them?”
“What do you think?” he said. “What happened to you?”
The bruise on Vivian’s head felt like it was swelling afresh in the heat of the cabin. What about the violet man she’d seen? She still refused to believe he’d been a mere figment of her imagination. She’d nearly killed herself trying to catch him.
“But everyone talks about Telos like it’s a real place,” said Vivian. “Even the people who are in on it.”
“Oh, Telos is real,” said Piotr matter-of-factly. “But it’s nowhere near here.”
“It’s not?”
Piotr leant forward and put his elbows on his knees.
“What did they say about your brother, exactly?” he said, cocking one ear in her direction. “He went up the mountain? Or he went to Telos?”
“Both.”
“Nope,” said Piotr. “Not the same thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“What did they say, word-for-word?”
Vivian tried to remember. Glenn and the initiates had said a lot of words, and not many of them had made sense.
“He had some special energy. And they’d kind of fast-tracked him through the course. Through the – what are they called? – stones.”
“And now he’s ascended. Am I right? Thirteenth Stone?”
“That’s right.”
Piotr looked at his feet and seemed to be smiling, though Vivian couldn’t see his face properly. He scuffed the floorboards with the toe of his boot.
“Now, miss, I don’t know if you’ll consider this good news or bad news.” He raised his head and looked past her to Troy. “Give me that,” he said.
“What?” said Troy.
“The phone.”
“Why?”
“Thirteenth Stone was your dad’s idea. It’s been nearly thirty years. But… well, I’ll show you.”
Troy handed over the phone. Piotr spent a few minutes scowling at the screen, like Vivian remembered her mum doing, poking slowly and precisely with the tip of one finger.
“You know what you’re doing with that, grandpa?” said Troy.
Piotr ignored him.
“Also,” Vivian said, remembering something suddenly. “Your brother. He mentioned something about a big house.”
Piotr laughed through his nose. “Uh-huh,” he said. He kept prodding at the phone. “We used to recruit the smart ones. Send them to head office.”
“Head office?”
“I mean, we didn’t call it that, obviously. Was your brother smart?”
“I guess so.”
“We got them to research Telos’s competitors – self-help stuff, spiritual stuff, any new bit of hokum that someone had decided was the new thing – and then we’d fold it into the franchise. I suppose the point was to make sure we could offer anything you could get elsewhere. We never missed a trick. The initiates didn’t mind. They thought it was all for the good of Telos. All part of the one truth. We got them doing pretty much everything. Research and development. Sales and marketing. Hell, they probably got your brother designing the goddamn website.”
Piotr handed over the phone. It was street-level view of an office building, maybe ten storeys high. It had greyish cladding and the windows were small and there was a half-empty parking lot outside the front doors. It was flanked by a laminate flooring wholesaler on one side, and the Contractors State License Board on the other. The address read: 9815, Lot A1, Business Park Drive, Sacramento CA.
“That,” said Piotr, “is Telos.”
21
SHE STARED at the photograph until Troy snatched his phone back, and after that stared at the palm of her hand where the phone had been. Troy started laughing through a mouthful of Twinkie.
“I knew it,” he said. “I said it. Didn’t I say it? I mean, I said Upper East Side, but this is way better.”
Piotr got up unsteadily and poured himself another drink. He went and drank it by the window, then scowled as if he’d seen something. He began scratching his tongue with his dirty fingernails.
“That’s it?” said Vivian. “That’s all Telos is?”
“You sound disappointed,” said Piotr.
“In Sacramento!” cried Troy. “It’s just too good!”
Vivian looked into the fire until the surface of her eyes seemed to dry and crisp. She felt unutterably bleak. The truth was this: she was disappointed. It had been nice to entertain the idea, however briefly, however ironically, that there really were answer
s somewhere up the mountain. That there really was a path she could follow that would bring her to something more meaningful than the life she was currently fumbling her way through. Even after the business at the Sanctuary, and the kidnapping, and Shelley, and the Carters, it was still a shame.
“Better than being dead,” said Piotr, with his back to them.
“I don’t know about that,” said Troy. “You ever been to Sacramento?”
“What is your problem, boy?”
“I mean, it’s no Crystal City, and that’s being very generous.”
“If your brother’s there, he’ll be okay. Physically, anyway.”
As much as she wanted to believe that, it didn’t tally with what Glenn had said, and it didn’t tally with an unnameable feeling she had about Jesse and his whereabouts. A certainty that other, more naïve people might have put down to some empathic bond between twins, but which Vivian couldn’t explain so easily.
“He’s here, though. I’m sure.” She stopped short of saying she could feel it. “Glenn definitely said he went up the mountain. He said he had, what was it… truly ascended.”
“That’s what they always say.”
“Maybe he never made it to Sacramento. Maybe he stayed here.”
“You think they give them a bus ticket and let them make their own way there? No, miss, someone will have made sure he got there.”
“But they said they didn’t know where he was. What if he got away from them, and came up here on his own?”
“Yikes,” said Troy. “No offence, Viv, but I saw your brother and he was no mountaineer.”
Piotr went back to staring out of the window. He buffed the dirty glass with the cuff of his shirt. Vivian came over. She couldn’t see anything besides the reflection of the man’s face, ghoulish in the firelight.
“Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”
Piotr was scowling again.
“He’s my age. My height. Looks… well, he looks like me.”
“What the hell have I been smoking?” he said, loudly.
“Mr Blucas?”
He whirled around to look at Troy.
“You put some kind of special ingredient in that cigarette?”
Troy held up his hands in a gesture that could have been either a protest of innocence or an admission of guilt.
“Mr Blucas…”
“You seeing this? Am I going crazy?”
He pointed out of the window. Vivian came to his shoulder and peered up the mountain. From over the next ridge came a faint glow that looked like sunrise, though the day had only ended a couple of hours ago.
“I see it,” said Vivian.
And then, the violet man. Just as Vivian remembered him, and just as Forrest had described him. He drifted like an ignis fatuus along the top of the ridge, and the trees showed up purple and black either side of him. He stopped and seemed to admire the view and then disappeared, leaving his glow behind him.
“Well,” said Piotr, “this is a fine new piece of theatre.”
“I’ve seen him before,” said Vivian. She was already moving towards the door of the cabin.
“Your dad used to do this shit, you know. Wander the mountain in his purple robes just when the initiates happened to be having one of their meditation sessions. Then, ta-dah! Throwing more money at it these days, looks like.”
“What is that?” said Troy. “Some kind of laser show?” Extricating himself from the bed seemed to take a lot of effort so he was just craning his neck.
Even if it was, Vivian wasn’t going to let him go again. She left the window and started to fiddle with the latch on the door.
“What are you doing?” said Troy. “Cougar’s still out there, Viv.”
“It’s him,” she said.
“Who?”
She didn’t answer that. She flung the door open and ran out into the chill darkness of the mountainside.
“You’re going to get eaten,” yelled Troy.
Vivian had no torch but the lingering haze from the violet man was enough for her to see her way. The going was steep. She hauled herself up between the trunks and the roots, dislodging small avalanches of earth and stones behind her. She was vaguely aware of Troy, or Mr Blucas, cursing in her wake – maybe the cougar, too – but she didn’t stop and she didn’t look back. When she reached the top of the ridge the violet figure came back into view, his head a little pink moon floating up and out of the trees. There was a kind of grace to the way he moved, as if he passed through the physical features of the mountain rather than around them. A fine piece of theatre, indeed.
She emerged from the treeline. It was freezing. The upper slopes of Mount Hookey looked scoured and blasted in the moonlight. The violet man was way, way ahead of her, almost at the point where the snow began.
She went down into a gully and began climbing the scree. She slipped every two or three steps but by now she was so cold she didn’t even feel the sharp edges of the rocks when they met her palms. She only knew she was bleeding when she tried to sweep a strand of hair out of her eyes and ended up leaving a warm, sticky smear across her forehead.
In a minute or two the violet man was out of sight. Vivian straightened, looked up the mountain. She felt a sudden, dizzying surge of blood to her head, then toppled over onto her side and started sliding down the way she’d come.
The descent somehow lasted longer than the climb. She slipped and rolled past the point where she’d emerged from the trees, down into some lower portion of the gully. The landslide roared around her, throwing clouds of freezing white dust into her nose and mouth. Then her coat snagged on something and she stopped falling, and the avalanche diminished to a trickle of stones and then to silence. She lay on her back and looked up at the stars, and then up the mountain. The violet man was gone. She’d lost him, again.
She lay very still for some time. She saw the dark shapes of Piotr and Troy at the top of the gully. The echo of their voices seemed to reach her before the voices themselves, from the opposite side of the mountain. They began to slither down after her.
Vivian sat up and turned around to see what had broken her fall in the first place. Something was tangled in the drawstring of her hood. At first she thought it was a tree root, until she began to untangle the cord and felt the shape of the fingers, curved and hard as talons. She scrambled to her feet and fought to swallow whatever was coming up out of her.
She stared at the hand. At some point Troy appeared by her side.
“Jesus,” he said. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
She scanned about and saw more of the outline of the hand’s owner among the fragments of rock. A shoulder, a knee, the toe of a shoe. A stiletto, looked like.
Piotr caught up last. He was less out of breath than Troy. He saw the body and grunted.
“There you go,” he said quietly. “That’s your dad’s legacy.” He sniffed. “My legacy. Poor stupid kid. I’m going back. I hope this is enough to convince you to do the same.”
He made to leave but Vivian didn’t move. She crouched down where the forearm projected up into the sky and began carefully clearing the rocks away from the rest of the body. Troy shone the torch of his phone. It picked out a string of brightly coloured beads, set against the dull, blue sheen of dead flesh. Vivian brushed gravel away from the face.
“Oh God,” she said. “It’s her.”
“Who?”
“That woman. Eenoo, or whatever.”
“From the trailer park!” There was a degree of excitement in Troy’s voice that made Vivian uncomfortable. “Well, fuck me.”
“She’s been up here before,” said Piotr. “I’ve seen her.”
Eenoo was no bigger than a child, curled up in masses of crystals and beaded jewellery and a huge fur coat. She had lost her hat somewhere in the fall. She looked mummified.
“I’m not staying up here,” said Piotr. “You can do what you want. I’ve told you what I know.”
Vivian stood up. She loo
ked to the summit of the mountain again.
“What about the man?” she said.
“The man?”
“We all saw him.”
“Have you lost your mind?” Piotr said. “Are you not seeing this?”
He pointed at Eenoo’s body.
“He might know about Jesse.”
“He’s a goddamn actor! It’s a stupid magic show! Man’s got LEDs in his pants or something!”
“I want to keep going.”
“Then you do that, miss. But be prepared to end up like this one here.”
He stared at her for a moment, waiting for her to change her mind. Troy was circling the body, taking pictures on his phone. He took a couple of himself, too, next to the body. Vivian could see him selecting filters and effects with great care.
She didn’t say anything else. Piotr huffed and set off up the side of the gully.
“What do we do about her?” Troy shouted after him.
“Nothing,” said Piotr over his shoulder. “Meat wagon will pick her up.”
“Meat wagon?” said Vivian.
“It’s been up here almost every night this week.” He’d reached the top of the ridge and was nearly out of earshot when he stopped and called back to them. “You think that’s the only body on the mountain right now?”
Vivian and Troy stood in silence on either side of Eenoo’s shrivelled form. The wind scoured the mountainside and sent eddies of dust swirling around their feet. Troy was still snapping away, stopping occasionally to flex his fingers.
“This is wild,” he said.
Vivian looked up the mountain. Back to the body. Back up the mountain. Why that urge to keep going? What was she hoping to find? Her father, up to his old tricks, in his purple dressing gown? No – they must have hired a new John of Telos to replace the dead one. But why do that at all? It seemed a ridiculously convoluted illusion to no discernible purpose. Unless they were deliberately luring initiates up to the summit? That seemed too sinister a motive, even for Telos – and besides, Glenn had tried to dissuade their students from going up the mountain on their own.
She thought about it for a minute or two, though there had never really been any doubt in her mind.
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