Dark Specter

by Michael Dibdin

  He lay on his bed of pain, clutching his head in the dense, sultry atmosphere, trying to hold the whole thing together. It was all there, he just had to contain it, to stop it from slipping away. Plus he must remember to make that call home. After what happened with Dale, they were going to be real anxious if they didn’t hear. He’d do it right after he called Pat.

  After a night of bloodless torture, the migraine suddenly abated just as the sky outside was starting to grow light. Utterly exhausted, Russell collapsed, hugging his pillow damp with sweat. When he awoke, it was full daylight and the room was vibrating with the noise of a demolition project in progress on a neighboring block. Russ looked at his watch. It was twenty past ten. He reached for the phone, dialed the number of the motel. It rang and rang, then someone picked up.

  “Uh huh?”

  A woman.

  “This 118?”

  “Uh huh.”

  There was a silence.

  “Who is this?” the woman demanded.

  Russ hung up. So his instinct last night had been right. Pat had lied about Cindy. There was no telling what she might have found out about him, and how much more she might have guessed. She would have asked questions, the way women always do, and Pat was a lousy liar.

  He dressed and walked seven blocks down Peachtree to Macy’s, where he bought an outfit identical to the one he had specified for Pat the night before. He also bought a plain black suitcase. Putting the other purchases in this, he returned to the hotel, picking up a Big Mac and fries to eat in his room.

  That afternoon he slept some more, a fitful, oppressive drowse infested by dreams so real it was like watching clips from a movie. The last featured a ringing telephone, and the noise of the bell was so loud and peremptory that Russell woke up, convinced that someone was calling him. The phone by his bed was silent. He checked his watch and realized that it was time to go.

  He showered and changed into the clothes he had bought, then checked his appearance in the mirror. The hair was maybe a little long, but he would pass. He took the Gideon Bible from the drawer by the bed and put it in the empty suitcase, along with a copy of The Watchtower and some leaflets with titles like “Can the Dead Harm the Living?” A guy had been handing them out some place he’d changed buses. Russell had been about to tell him to go piss up a rope when he’d had an idea.

  Religion was big down in the South. Everyone was into it, whites and blacks alike. So he’d got chatting with the guy and come away with a wad of literature which they would put to good use that evening. No one would think twice about a couple of guys in suits pitching their particular brand of redemption door to door. All they had to do was visit a couple of houses on the street first, then hit the target. “Hi, how are you folks doing today? We’re calling on people in this neighborhood to tell them about God’s plans for you.” Which was true enough, except they weren’t planning to tell them.

  At six forty-five, Russell checked his preparations for the last time, picked up the suitcase and rode the elevator down to the lobby. Russ gave the night clerk a curt nod. An extravagant smile split open the man’s shining face.

  “Wrong way!” he breathed.

  Russ walked out on to the street, pocketing his key. The bus stop was three blocks away. He walked at a steady pace, occasionally shifting the suitcase from one hand to the other. It was pretty heavy. As well as the Jehovah’s Witness material, there were the two revolvers, fully loaded, plus a box of spare ammunition, the handcuffs, a roll of duct tape pre-cut into four-inch lengths, and the camcorder to tape the ceremony.

  The bus was almost empty. Once south of Alabama Street it drove fast, hardly stopping, through a wasteland of car lots and small industrial businesses. By the time they bumped over the railroad crossing on McDaniel, Russ was the only passenger. It was only then that he realized, too late, the meaning of the unconscious summons which had woken him. He had forgotten to call home. He had been so disturbed by missing Pat that morning, and still more by finding Cindy there in his place, that it had completely slipped his mind. Oh well, he’d call tomorrow with the news that the operation had been a success. They wouldn’t freak out if they didn’t hear from him for one day.

  He got off at the stop he’d used that afternoon, crossed the road and walked up the street opposite. It was even hotter and stickier here than it had been downtown, and the air was laced with patches of exotic scent. Cicadas grated away in the undergrowth over a bass section of whinnying frogs. Russ felt as though he’d stumbled into one of those old jungle movies they had on TV about three in the morning.

  He climbed the hill, gripping the suitcase in a palm already damp with sweat. Quite a few people seemed to be out on their porches. He hadn’t noticed them at first, mere shadowy presences in the pervading darkness. It was only the soft murmur of voices, punctuated by the occasional throaty laugh, which gave them away. But once he started looking, he realized they were everywhere. No one said anything as he passed, but he knew they were watching him.

  This was something he hadn’t expected. Why the hell couldn’t they have drawn a place like that suburb where Pat got lost the night before, an all-white neighborhood where everyone homed in, clustering around the electronic hearth in their widely spaced, secluded properties? He’d much rather have gone in there, even if it had a security system and those little metal tags in the lawn marked Armed Response. But you didn’t get to choose. They’d performed the calculations the usual way, and this was the address that came up. It was meant to be, so it would be. He tried to comfort himself with this thought.

  When he rounded the corner of the block, near the top of the hill, a figure detached itself from the still torrent of vines which had engulfed a retaining wall on the other side of the street. Russ found himself wishing that he’d taken his gun out of the case. Then something about those jerky, uncoordinated movements reassured him that this was one of his own kind. A moment later he recognized his partner.

  “You got the piece?” Pat asked him.

  “Piece?” Russell queried vaguely.

  “The gun, man! C’mon, let’s go!”

  Pat was transformed, taut and wired like one of life’s natural go-to guys. Despite his narbo outfit, the suit a size too small by the looks of it, you could sense the energy he was giving off. Just being around him made Russell feel woozy from lack of sleep, stale air and too much thinking. He opened the suitcase and handed Pat one of the revolvers, pocketing the other himself.

  “We’ll cruise by a couple of the other houses first,” he said. “Set up our cover.”

  Pat waved impatiently.

  “Fuck that, man! Let’s just do it! Get in, get out, don’t screw around.”

  His air of urgency was so strong that Russ hesitated, a moment too long to insist.

  “OK,” he murmured.

  It was all wrong, he knew, letting the initiate lead like this. On the other hand, Pat’s mood might change again at any moment, leaving him with a cowering wimp on his hands. Better to ride the moment.

  They set off along the side street running parallel to McDaniel. Up here there didn’t seem to be so many people out on the porches. In fact many of the houses looked abandoned. Maybe they were going to clear the area and put up more projects. Pat strode along, humming some staccato melody under his breath. Russell could hardly keep up. He glanced curiously at his partner.

  “You been drinking?”

  “I had a shot with a greeny back,” Pat replied carelessly. “Man, that stuff sure works, you don’t use it all the time.”

  “That’s way out of line!” Russell snapped. “You know we’re not supposed to do drink or drugs when we’re-”

  “Hey, what is this? ‘The floggings will continue until morale improves?’ Don’t treat me like a little kid.”

  “Hold it right there!”

  Russell gripped his partner’s arm and pulled him around.

  “You want me to call this whole thing off right now?”

  Pat shook his head quickly.r />
  “OK! Then remember I’m in charge here. I don’t want to go down because you’re too snockered to stick to the game plan.”

  They rounded the corner into Carson Street-322 was the sixth house on the left. Russell opened the suitcase again. The copy of The Watchtower was lying right on top, but the pamphlets seemed to have wriggled down to the back somewhere.

  “Hey!” said Pat.

  The beam of light falling on the suitcase from the streetlamp behind was suddenly cut off.

  “Hand it over, motherfucker!”

  Russell straightened up, still holding the magazine. There were three of them, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old by the looks of it, all black. The one who had spoken had a body like a barrel. He was wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and a pair of jeans which looked two sizes too big even for him. He and one of the others had pistols, the third a knife.

  “We’re just children of God,” Russell found himself saying, holding up The Watchtower like a sign. “We’re spreading the word of the Lord in this neighborhood.”

  The squat guy waved his chunky snub-barreled automatic.

  “I don’t give a fuck who you are, honky! Hand over your shit or your ass is history!”

  That was all they’d needed to do, Russell realized a moment later, when it was too late to do anything. Just hand over their wallets and watches and the suitcase and let the three youths run off with them. Instead, Pat pulled his pistol and shot the guy in the chest and stomach.

  “Christ Almighty!” cried the other gunman, a skinny kid in tight red pants and a basketball jersey.

  Russell could have taken him there and then, but he hesitated a second too long, knowing he wasn’t empowered to kill them. There was a flash of steel, then a grinding sound as the knife hit one of his ribs. Another shot, much louder, sent Pat spinning away. Then something huge hit Russell harder than he had ever been hit before. He tasted blood, mixed in with the dirt of the street. There were other sounds, other sensations, but he had no names for them. It didn’t matter. Pretty soon they faded, like everything else.

  12

  At that point, of course, I still thought I had a choice. Not just about staying or going, or even falling in love, but about things like how I spent my time. So I was disconcerted to find that, like all the others, I was expected to attend a lecture on the poetry of William Blake every afternoon.

  The lectures were given by Sam. That first one lasted two and three-quarter hours, and seemed even longer at the time. I learned later that they often were longer, particularly when things threatened to fall apart. The one Sam had given on the day after the news about Dale Watson came through apparently lasted well over six hours, starting right after lunch and going on until well after dark. I didn’t understand then, of course, that Sam was struggling to retain control, and that his labored exposition of Blake’s so-called prophetic books was merely a means to this end. This was just one of many things I didn’t understand.

  My only previous contact with Blake’s work had been in a class I took at college. Like a lot of people back then, I’d been seduced by the idea that Blake was an acidhead born ahead of his time. All that stuff about seeing the universe in a grain of sand, we’d been there, done that. Hell, we’d seen it in an empty Coke bottle, a crumpled cigarette packet, a capsized cockroach. We were old hands at relative reality, and although Blake had never actually dropped himself (but it was hard to score good shit back then) and tended to maunder on at times (but it could have been really neat if Pink Floyd had set it to music), we decided in a slightly patronizing way to add the old buffer to our gallery of proto-hippies like Huxley, Hesse and the rest. We knew where he was coming from. It also didn’t hurt that the professor who taught the class was young and hip and, according to the student guide, graded generously.

  As I said earlier, it was there that I had first run into Sam. We wrote our final papers together over a thirty-six-hour period, with the help of twelve tabs of high-grade amphetamine we had pooled our money to score, knowing we would never get the damn things finished any other way. Sam managed to scrape by with a passing grade, although only after I had gone through his paper and suggested numerous changes and additions. It was therefore all the more of a shock to see him stride into the hall after lunch that afternoon and launch into a lengthy exegesis on a passage from Jerusalem in front of the assembled company. There were nineteen of them in all, six men and thirteen women, ranging in age from the mid-forties to a girl who looked no more than sixteen, if that. So I was doubly chagrined to discover that the one person I wanted to see, and if possible sit next to, was not there.

  For some reason, Andrea didn’t appear. No one remarked on her absence, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask where she was. This was a bitter blow. She hadn’t been at lunch either, and I had been counting on seeing her at the lecture, given that attendance was apparently obligatory. That was certainly the impression I had got from Mark when he approached me while I was finishing up my bowl of Rice-a-Roni.

  “Right after this we have the reading. Stick around. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  “It’s never too late, they say,” I replied lightly.

  His hard, glazed gaze transfixed me.

  “Some people, it’s too late when they’re born.”

  Despite this heavy hint, the only reason I stayed was in hopes of seeing Andrea. Whatever Mark might say, Sam clearly had the last word, and he had told me that morning that I didn’t have to do anything except veg out and enjoy myself. But I stuck around, and of course Andrea didn’t show. And once there, wedged in among all the others, I found it impossible to get up and walk out.

  Not only did everybody else turn up, but they all stuck it out to the very end, listening attentively in reverential silence. When I was teaching, I’d had a hard enough time getting my students to concentrate for twenty minutes at a stretch on texts with far more to offer than Blake’s homespun comic books, with their apocalyptic bombast and jejune mythologizing. Yet Sam had these waifs and strays and dropouts, not to mention tough sons-of-bitches like Mark, hanging on his every word for almost three hours.

  We were seated cross-legged on the floor throughout, as if to dispel any lingering doubts I might have had that Blake was a pain in the ass. Once we had taken our places, Sam strode in, carrying what turned out to be a facsimile edition of Blake’s illuminated edition of Jerusalem. He was dressed the same way that he had been all morning, but his bearing and presence were very different. He moved in a springy, feline way, and he radiated confidence, knowledge and power.

  The session began with a reading:

  I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep

  And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre and its cruel Shadow.

  I see the Past, Present and Future, existing all at once

  Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!

  That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose

  .

  Having declaimed these lines in a loud, stagy voice, Sam closed the book like a Bible and looked at us in silence, as though to gauge their effect on us. After a protracted pause, he went on in a deliberately contrasted tone, quiet and husky, as though talking to himself.

  “You’ve listened to the word of God. But have you heard it? Do you understand it? Do you know what it means?”

  I glanced at my neighbors. The word of God? I was thinking. But none of them appeared to share my consternation.

  “DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS?” Sam screamed suddenly at the top of his voice.

  No one answered. I had a terrible urge to say “Beats my pair of jacks!” but in the circumstances I felt that such levity would be frowned on.

  “Of course you don’t,” snapped Sam, answering his rhetorical question. “You don’t have the first fucking idea! Even the blowhards out there who are always ready to give attitude about the decisions I make. Especially them.”

  He fixed Mark with a glare.

  “If it wasn’t for me,
you zit-brains would still be hanging out on some street corner trying to find the truth at the bottom of a quart of Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty. Think about that, next time you dare question the word of Los!”

  I remembered the children addressing Sam that morning as “Los.” When I had asked him why, he’d told me that I should know the answer. At the time, I’d thought he was just being his usual smart-ass self, but now I realized he was right. Los, of course, was one of Blake’s allegorical characters. I couldn’t remember much about him, except that he was called “the Eternal Prophet.”

  His introductory harangue over, Sam started in on his exposition of the text. This was unconventional, to say the least. “The Humanity in deadly sleep” supposedly referred to the masses of people living in ignorance of the truth. Commingled with them were “emanations” and “specters,” which Sam apparently conceived of as zombie-like creatures of human appearance but lacking a soul. He, Los the Prophet, had an overview of all time, past, present and future, and was engaged on a program to awaken “Albion”-the “Eternal Man”-from his ignorance and thus bring Time to an end.

  This, I think, was the gist of Sam’s speech. Just like a regular preacher, however, he kept throwing in other snippets of text in an attempt to buttress his position with a show of scriptural authority.

  “Blake says of these specters, ‘To be all evil, all reversed and forever dead: knowing and seeing life, yet living not,’ chapter ten, lines fifty-seven and eight, and again in chapter eight, lines thirteen through eighteen, ‘My Emanation is dividing and thou my Spectre art divided against me. But mark I will compel thee to assist me in my terrible labors. To beat these hypocritic Selfhoods on the Anvils of bitter Death I am inspired. I act not for myself: for Albion’s sake I now am what I am, a horror and an astonishment.’