by Ted Thackrey
Angela was nude, her body as perfect and unmarked as I remembered it; features composed as if for sleep. The chains that I recalled from the smaller altar at her home were attached to the sides of this fire bowl, too. But they had not been locked in place, and the only reason I could imagine for that was one that blew holes in the tissue of ready composure I was trying to hold against madness.
It was too much.
I had been here before and I had paid my dues and it was too much. Too damn much! Forcing my hand across the inches that separated it from her forehead was an effort that brought a sweat of effort—and fear—to my face, and the salt sting of it filled my eyes when the touch caused her to stir warmly against my fingertips.
Gideon had left her there, alive but helpless, while he made his final arrangements.
She stirred uneasily when I scooped her up and moved her to the pile of matting in the corner. Sooty eyelashes fluttered when I held her in a sitting position and tried to get some kind of conscious response. But the pupils were pinpoint-fine and unresponsive when I lifted the lids, and there was no sense of the lively wa that would have been involved in any process of awakening. The body showed no obvious sign of maltreatment, but there were fresh needles tracks on both arms and time was passing.
Too much time. I made her as comfortable as I could on the matting and used another mat to provide something like covering.
Where was Gideon . . .?
The room had two doors. The one I had used for ingress from the elevator corridor was still open, and I could see past the woman who was still tearing at her face to the mindless sprawl that was Terry Palermo.
No access there.
That left the door at the far end of the room, and I was as careful going through it as I had been in entering the penthouse. But the only surprise was that it was unlocked and unguarded; no one tried to stop me from moving out onto the tar and gravel freedom of the hotel roof, or from trying the door set into a little triangular service stairway at the far side. The door wouldn’t budge, and a padlock set into the outside security bolt told me Gideon hadn’t left his aerie by that route.
So where was the crazy bastard?
His intentions were obvious, the method plain. He had been so sure of it that he hadn’t even bothered to chain Angela into her sacrificial pose. Was he somewhere in the building now, pouring gasoline into wine bottles? If so, why hadn’t he done it here, in the security of a place where he would be proof against all possible interruption.
I went back into the penthouse room and noticed the electronic card-key still inserted in the door slot.
Where I had left it.
In haste.
I looked at it and then at Terry and wondered for the first time how she had been left alone in the elevator—along with the little plastic rectangle that guarded the portals of Gideon’s personal world.
Was it coincidence? Had Gideon overlooked the card while occupied with the grisly business of bringing Willie up to the lobby and fastening him into position on the cross?
Willie . . .
The music began in my head once more—the long minor chord, still far distant, that had become my personal invitation to the danse macabre. But I beat it back with a sudden desperation and forced my body into violent motion, exerting bone and muscle to the limit in a dash for the waiting elevator.
Willie!
The sudden thought of Willie told me all I needed to know about Gideon and the kind of Götterdämmerung he had planned for himself and the sheep of his pasture. I knew where I would find him now. No room for doubt. And no more time. No more time at all . . .
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Use your time and strength and mentality in any other way . . . and live in mortal fear.
THIRTY-ONE
The elevator made a lot of noise on its way to the basement. If Gideon was down there, doing what I thought he must be doing, this would give him plenty of early warning.
But it was too late to worry about that.
Or anything else.
Willie Axe was a man who took things seriously; he was a serious professional snitch when he made his living that way and he went about his chores at the Temple of the Eternal Flame with the same dogged attitude. So, I hadn’t paid much attention to his comments about the furnace and boiler he attended in the bowels of the old hotel. But now the words came back loud and clear.
“A creeper,” he had called it.
Nothing to worry about, even though the safety valve was corroded and inoperable. All a man had to do was keep an eye on the gauge and adjust the controls when the pressure got too high. A simple fact of life for Willie.
But a fact of death in the hands of Gideon. He would be in the basement now, tending the boiler in his own fashion. Getting up steam for a guided tour of Gehenna.
I was alone in the descending car. Terry Palermo had offered no resistance—hadn’t seemed to know what was happening—when I dragged her out into the penthouse corridor and left her there, still sucking her thumb and staring amazed at the unseen. I wondered distractedly how much of Gideon’s patent reality-cure she’d ingested and how long it would keep bending the edges of reality for her. My own continued reactions were not encouraging, especially since Master Masuda’s basic training in ogawa had saved me from the effect of a full dose.
Not that it would matter if I didn’t get to the furnace in time to stop Gideon.
He would be waiting. Ready for me . . .
I snapped off the overhead light and moved aside in darkness, summoning hara into the belly, as the car descended past the lobby floor. Set the synapses for immediate reaction as it jolted to a stop at the lower end of the shaft. Waited for the door to open automatically.
And found myself staring out into fully illuminated tranquility.
The basement I remembered had been dark and filled with bogeys, a place of shadow where wispy little Willie Axe had been able to strike down three hulking thugs from ambush; the way to his homemade hidey-hole had been a midnight maze that only he could traverse unaided. I had expected it to be the same this time; somehow the possibility of full-scale modern electric lighting had simply never occurred to me.
But the dingy jumble of storage racks and piping visible from the elevator doorway was in no way remarkable.
Just a hotel basement.
I took a single step forward, searching the dirty concrete-block wall on either side of the elevator for the complex of switches that I knew must be there. Saw nothing. Wondered vaguely about that—and hurled myself abruptly forward in a double roll just in time to avoid the crushing weight of something heavy and rust-covered that came slamming down from the ceiling to gouge a hole in the concrete floor where I had been standing as the basement lights evaporated in a midnight carnival of unrelieved blackness.
Staying in one place was insanity, a coaxing courtship of death. But the risk had to be taken. The shoes I was wearing were too noisy. They had to go and so did the socks.
The next move was Gideon’s, and I used the moments of waiting to remove all other items of clothing that could be used as grips and handles. Coat and shirt went quickly; I used them to wrap the socks and one shoe but saved the other shoe out of the bundle at the last moment. As a gift for Gideon.
But for what seemed like a long time nothing happened.
Patience is as potent a weapon as any in the arsenal of the karateka. Saika tanden, the state of nothingness that leaves its possessor calm and ready for any eventuality, also gives clarity to thought and direction to the limbs when action finally is indicated. I stood perfectly still and invoked saika now, listening and waiting in that unity of mind and body that is the central essence of true and lively existence.
Physical vision was out of the question; the human eye can take up to forty minutes to make the full adjustment from day to night and I would be lucky to have forty seconds.
Had Gideon kept his own eyes closed while the lights were on?
No.
So, it was time to move.
The shoe that I had saved out of the clothes bundle made a satisfactory clatter landing far away in the darkness where I had thrown it, and I moved with the care of a ballet dancer into the protective vicinity of a concrete pillar I had spotted just before the lights went out.
No breathing now. Listen. And wait.
And wait.
And then Gideon laughed. The sound was in the middle distance of the basement, and even allowing for wall resonance it seemed to come from some point above my head. He must have climbed into the rafters, if there were any—I hadn’t noticed during my own brief visual inspection—when he heard the elevator coming his way, and he would be perched there now, waiting for me to come within range.
“Nice move, Preacher,” he said in the musical baritone I remembered. “The sound of the shoe was far too loud to persuade me that you were shifting in that direction, but it was an excellent distraction to cover your actual move. You’re beside the pillar now. If it’s of any interest, I’m above and to your right.”
Involuntarily, my head moved. I stopped it with a sense of self-disgust.
And was suddenly, agonizingly aware of just how much I wanted to keep the single viable eye that I still possessed. The veneer of civilization is less than a molecule deep, a flimsy wall of reason raised against the terrors of an uncomprehended world where darkness and death can be expressed in a single word. Men first worshiped the sun because it drove those night riders back into the shadows that spawned them, created myths about the coming of fire because it was the first demon-destroying magic that he learned to control. More modern means of illumination—candles and oil lamps and gaslights and electric bulbs—were only embroidery. Light made man a hunter; darkness made him prey. And the eternal darkness of the sightless world is an oppression inconceivable to the sighted.
I remembered my own weeks of waiting in an army hospital for the bandages to come off. And what I planned to do if I found that the doctors had lied about my other eye being intact.
“Feel the gloom pressing in a little now, Preacher?” Gideon inquired.
I couldn’t be certain, but it seemed to me that he had moved; the voice was coming now from a slightly different position in the area above me. Closer, perhaps. And farther to the right.
“Come on,” he said. “Talk to me. Don’t be afraid—I won’t hurt you. Why should I? We both know that all I have to do is wait . . . ”
It was true. The creeper furnace was building pressure while we sat there in the dark, measuring each other. Little by little, the pointer on a gauge somewhere was climbing through the black calibration marks toward a zone marked in red. That was where old Willie was supposed to come in and adjust a valve or a tap that would send it back to Go.
Machines love games like that.
Something to pass the eternity.
But Willie wouldn’t be playing anymore; game called due to mass insanity. And it occurred to me that the new hand who’d taken over Willie’s end of the action might have decided to speed things up—dispense with the preliminaries and turn the dial to Show Time. But Gideon knew the location of the furnace and I didn’t.
Which was a song cue if ever I’d heard one. I began to sing:
“Brightly beams Our Father’s mercy
“From His lighthouse evermore. . . . ”
Angela had said it was Gideon’s favorite hymn.
I took another step to my left and let the words out full-chest, offering him a number one sound target on the chance that he might be unable to resist the impulse to stop me if I was moving in a direction that seemed to threaten his plan.
Nothing at all happened for a moment, and I drew breath to try another line or two.
But Gideon was in a musical mood after all, and he supplied the next lines himself:
“But to us He gives the keeping
“Of the lights along the shore.”
He had moved again; this time I was sure of it. The old basement was full of echoes and the voice had seemed to come from several places at once, but the strongest source—and the one that was just a split second ahead of the others—was still above my head and closer now than it had been.
Gideon was tracking me as I was tracking him. By sound.
I moved back a full step, freezing my core to total stillness and then allowing it to warm and put forth branches. Testing the air. Searching for the aura, the wa of the only other sentient being in range of my senses.
Nothing.
Either Gideon’s shielding was so perfect that I could not even detect the presence of his ego, or my own sensory mechanisms had sustained too much damage to do their work properly.
Instantly, as if in answer to my unvoiced question, the stygian air was filled with music again. But no hymn. The ghostly, prolonged minor chord that shimmered and shattered as it floated in from some unimaginable distance would not be heard by Gideon. It was my own thing—Prelude in LSD for Ash Can and Chorus.
I had brought it on by dropping the barriers in an effort to find Gideon, and they had to go up again. At once.
But I couldn’t do that.
“Let the lower lights be burning, . . . ”
It seemed to help a little; singing the words and trying to concentrate on real sounds pushed the specter-music back to the boundaries of the world. Kept the night around me from twisting into pink-melted ruin.
“Send a gleam across the wave. . . . ”
Gideon’s voice steadied the world for me again, reminded me of the passage of time and of dangers more real than imagined.
He had come closer.
Stalking.
Leftward movement hadn’t seemed to worry him so I tried the other direction, moving five quick steps to the right after a snap of the fingers that told my ears the way was clear of large objects.
“Some poor fainting, struggling seaman . . . ”
There was an immediate stir in the air above me, and the faintest sound of displaced dirt cascading to the floor.
Gideon didn’t like me moving to the right.
He was moving with me. And he had resisted the urge to supply the next line of the hymn.
I gathered myself to move again—farther to the right and a step or two forward to keep him off balance—but froze in place instead, puzzled but elated when I realized that I could see again.
Not much.
Not enough to recognize forms, and for a terrible minute I wondered if the dim red flickering in the near distance could be more hallucination. Companion of the mind-chord.
But it disappeared when I closed my eye, and that made it a part of reality. No wonder Gideon didn’t like to hear me moving in this direction. I had found the furnace, and that could interfere with his endgame.
Move!
I feinted left and hurled myself bodily to the right. Just in time. The dark world exploded in a bolt of lightning and a clap of thunder that sent cement chips flying past my head, forcing me to shield my eyes. Low-grade dynamite or an M60 equipped with a percussion fuse—easy enough to be totally blinded by a near miss at close quarters. I wondered if he had any more of those.
Something large and alive landed catlike on the balls of the feet nearby, and I kicked out instinctively while rolling back to the left, making glancing contact that brought a satisfactory grunt of pain.
The furnace.
Get to the furnace . . .
Gideon’s flash-bang had damped my eye receptors past the point of perceiving the dim glow I had seen before, but I retained the sense of its direction and risked two running steps toward it before ducking and rolling to the right, dropping the sensory guards I had erected to keep madness at bay. Let it come now. I had to know whe
re Gideon was and be ready to counter him.
But the next impression was far from subtle.
Without warning, the darkness beside me was filled with hard objects moving at murderous speed. A double kick to the rib cage robbed me of breath, and a blunt-fisted blow to the side of the head burst the lightlessness apart in a pyrotechnic shower, and then I was down flat against the coldness, fighting the pain in my chest to inhale Gideon’s breath, the sour stench of an animal intent on the kill.
Leverage and position were both in his favor and he used them with trained competence, hammering the bone structure at the side of my face with a series of lance-fingered blows that set off flashing lights behind my eye and left me powerless to prevent a new attack on the damaged ribs. The hammering forced breath from my lungs for a second time and left no doubt that I was in real trouble.
Angela’s comparison—her evaluation of Gideon as some mirror image of the person I was or believed myself to be—flashed fleetingly to mind. Right on, love!
You called it . . .
I lashed out from my prone position and missed. And knew. For the moment, at least, Gideon was more than my twin; he was my superior in the most important possible way. Here and now he was able to sense my intention an instant before it became motion. And I could not detect his.
The ability to sink into my surroundings, to feel with the mind of another and think with his thoughts, was gone from me. Perhaps it would return; perhaps not. But surely not if I did not find some way to break free and close the distance to the furnace.
The furnace . . .
Now!
Gideon had found a weapon, something metallic and heavy his hand had scrabbled up from the floor nearby, and he used it to strike at the left side of my head. The seeing side. The side I had to protect at all cost.
My arm was free on that side and I reached out blindly with questing and desperate fingers. By accident or proximity, I found the end of the metal object and used the grip in an akido move—a throw that employed Gideon’s own motion and immobile position as a fulcrum to bring him close to me, inward at the bottom of an arc that left him open to a blunt-lance strike with the other hand.