King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  It surprised him and might have succeeded, but my own position prevented me from exerting the force needed. The neck vertebrae did not crack, and the best I could do was use Gideon’s momentary loss of control to roll out of range.

  The metal weapon descended again with a force that struck sparks from the floor where my head had been.

  The furnace . . .

  One arm was pinned under me by the roll and I struggled to free it, but I was hard against another reinforced concrete pillar and there was no room. A blurred sense of movement above me, of the hot intent to main and kill, brought reaction without conscious thought, and I shot the free hand forward, fingers together, stiff as a blade of steel.

  Rammed the blunt lance of bone and sinew under the lower edge of Gideon’s sternum, penetrating tendon and skin and muscle.

  Felt the curve of the living heart.

  And squeezed.

  Gideon’s lungs drew a belated, instinctive breath, spasmed but could not expel it, and in an instant my nostrils were filled with the pungent, copper-tainted odor of blood mixed with feces as the sphincter relaxed and the whole weight of the body collapsed upon me in a final nerveless comprehension of its own death.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Judge all prophets—shamans, holy men, or teachers of a New Enlightenment—by standards at least as stringent as those you would impose in selecting a baby-sitter.

  And keep an eye on your own sense of personal accountability. It is the defensive armor of the spirit.

  Don’t leave home without it.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The Furnace . . .

  My good eye was open, straining to detect the red glow that had indicated the position of the furnace before, and there was a moment of pure animal panic when it showed me only blackness.

  That ghostly minor chord sounded again—stress, yes—and grew louder, accompanied by a powerful urge to simply lie still and let the world end.

  I closed the eye again, beating back the shadows to erect a mental shield against all influence but that of my own will.

  The music faded to pianissimo, died away into silence.

  And reason returned. Gideon’s body was still sprawled on top of me, pinning me to the floor. The blow that finally stopped his machinery had been a supreme effort, consuming every ounce of energy and leaving little or nothing in reserve. Moving the encumbrance aside required planning and concentration. Sitting up was a major undertaking. But worthwhile; fear and darkness were driven back as the world around me was outlined once more by dim firelight. Gideon’s remains had merely blocked the view before.

  I rolled my feet under me and stood up.

  Must get to the furnace . . .

  The glow seemed brighter ahead, and I moved in that direction, blinking the restored eye in an orgy of visual self-congratulation. Good old eye! Half a loaf is not merely better than none, it is a blessing beyond comprehension.

  A hissing noise I had noticed before, without paying much attention, increased markedly in volume as I neared the source of the red light.

  Poor old Willie’s creeper furnace and boiler occupied the whole south end of the basement, crouching among a tangle of pipes and valves and gauges that extended past the meager circle of illumination offered by the firebox grating.

  Dammit, I needed light!

  Willie had known which knob was which and so, presumably, had Gideon. But neither was in a position to tell me anything now, and the switches controlling the basement lighting system were beyond finding.

  I took a deep breath, fighting down a new wave of terrors, and tried to consider the problem logically. Willie had controlled the boiler pressure by resetting a valve somewhere—but cutting off the heat ought to work just as well. The hotel’s bathwater might get cold, and the hell with that. Let ’em sue me.

  But which valve controlled the gas?

  There were no pipes leading directly to the firebox so far as I could see, no obvious connections, nothing painted red or labeled “emergency cutoff.”

  All right, then. Forget that . . .

  I blinked the eye closed for a long moment and began what I hoped was a systematic survey of the insulated pipes leading from the furnace to the bloated bulk of the boiler.

  One of them had to be the main pressure control.

  But which?

  I thought about Willie, living down here among the hissing shadows, and wondered about the kind of emotional disablement that had caused him to think himself fortunate—a saved member of the Master’s flock. Gideon might have been a phony and a charlatan, but it couldn’t all have been moonshine. Part of the magic had been real. It had worked. For Willie, anyway.

  Which valve . . .?

  Willie couldn’t have been doing the job by guesswork; the control he used to keep the boiler’s pressure in bounds had to be equipped with some kind of gauge. Some means of checking results. All right, then: Rule out anything without a dial or readout of some kind. I scanned the visible part of the complex again and settled on two possibles. Both fitted with wheel controls, both spiked into the system beside glass-faced gauges whose markings I couldn’t quite make out in the gloom.

  Roll the dice!

  I reached out for the wheel nearer the boiler—that had to make sense, didn’t it; put the gauge close to what it’s supposed to measure—but the fingers never made contact.

  Instead, the world exploded.

  The hand stopped inches from its goal and then fell away at more than light-speed as furnace, boiler, pipes, gauges, and the whole feeble structure of reality that supported them contracted suddenly to a single point of blinding incandescence before collapsing upon themselves in the total, devouring lightlessness of a dark star.

  I wasn’t unconscious for more than a second or two, but when my eye was open and able to focus again, it showed me things I could not comprehend.

  Gideon was there, towering above me.

  Etched in crimson.

  The white suit I remembered was ripped and dirty, and the outsize ankh pendant hung awry amid the blood-drenched ruin of his chest, but it was the face that stamped itself forever in memory.

  He had flung open the fire door of the furnace and stood swaying in its light—mouth agape as the lungs struggled to draw each rattling breath, eyes bulging and malevolent with the awful effort of holding death at bay for long enough to accomplish a fixed and terrible purpose.

  I ordered my body to move, to protect itself. Roll away from imminent destruction. Defend. Or attack.

  Nothing happened.

  Hallelujah!

  The spook choir was back with its minor-key serenade, and at last I could make out what they were singing.

  Hallelujah!

  Gideon’s face turned down to look at me, and the mouth twitched in what he probably thought was a smile. I think he tried to say something, but either he didn’t have the breath to do it or the choir music was too loud, because I couldn’t seem to hear him. But the meaning was clear. I watched, helpless, as he grasped the control wheel I had been reaching for and turned it clockwise. It stopped short after a single turn and the hissing that had been the only audible competition for the choir ceased suddenly. Gideon swayed again, still looking at me, and nodded.

  Right!

  That ought to do it . . .

  Hallelujah!

  He bent down, reaching for me with both hands, and took two staggering steps to position himself astride my waist before grasping me under the arms and lifting me first into a sitting position and then to my knees.

  I wondered, abstractedly, what he thought he was doing.

  But not for long. Heat from the open furnace door struck my face with the force of a breath from hades and I made an interesting discovery: I could move my toes.

  Hallelujah!

  Reality buckled at the center and began to show me more pink uncertainty than red doom; the ego had come to life, using materials to hand in an effort to protect itself from a potentially disastrous si
tuation beyond its control. I would rather go mad than burn.

  Hallelujah!

  Gideon stepped to one side, still holding me in position, and my hands were working again, responsive to the freed will.

  But there would be only one chance. Wait . . .

  Gideon was behind me now, still in control of my shoulders, knee braced in the center of my back. My head was on a direct line with the flame-belching maw of the furnace, and I did not dare alert him by moving. He wanted me conscious but helpless for my advance sampling of perdition.

  Hallelujah!

  The choir was all around me, its music a paean of praise as Gideon braced himself for the final thrust that would propel my body into the flames—and at that moment I lurched forward, deliberately bringing my head into the circle of unbearable heat in order to put the hands where they could reach back to grasp the fabric of his trousers near the ankles.

  Hallelujah!

  The movement startled him, and he released the upper part of my body momentarily to deal with the annoyance, which gave me an opportunity to see if the larger muscles of my legs were back in business. They were, and we went over backwards in a tangle.

  Gideon’s rattling breath-cadence had increased with the effort of preparing me for cremation, but it ceased altogether now as he scrambled to free himself. The face that struggled up from, the floor near mine was that of a bloated demon, lacking all trace of humanity, and it came at me with teeth bared.

  Hallelujah!

  I think he intended to bite off my nose, but he missed and the jaws clamped on my neck, missing the carotid by a whisker. I raised a hand to beat at his head, but it was like pounding a rock. A strange smell filled the air, and I recognized it with a kind of abstract interest. My hair was afire.

  Hallelujah!

  Consciousness was going. The world of sound and motion seemed suddenly distant and unreal, the effort of survival insupportable.

  The stunned heaviness of the rest of the body and the cramped environment prevented use of any of the normal atemi or percussions; my hands clawed out, grasping for any purchase. Any weapon.

  And closed on something solid.

  Hallelujah!

  Gideon’s pectoral ankh was in my hand, its loop top flat against my palm, crosspiece clutched in the fingers, the long silver leg protruding from my fist like a Nubian stiletto.

  I turned it, trying to stab downward at the already damaged chest cavity, but failed to inflict more than a scratch.

  The cross was still connected to him by the chain.

  The missed blow with the pectoral cross had caused his jaws to relax their grip on my neck, but he rolled on top of me again, clamping a hand down across my face and smashing my head against the floor. I fought for breath and tried to concentrate. The cross was still in my grasp, still potent. But his hand had blotted out the world again, making it impossible to find a target.

  I ceded control, abandoning conscious thought and giving over the complications of existence to the portions of the mind that govern intuitive thought.

  Sought saika to prepare.

  And struck upward, encountering resistance and hurling the whole force of myself against it . . .

  Hallelujah!

  The hand on my face clutched convulsively once, and I thought I heard the hoarse discord of a scream amid the singing sounds that filled my head. But it was gone a moment later and the hand relaxed.

  And then Gideon was below me on the concrete floor.

  Firelight played and danced on his face and I could see now the target my hand had found when the eye could not. The leg of the silver ankh cross had gone up Gideon’s right nostril, penetrating the sinus cavity and driving itself deep into the brain.

  Hallelujah!

  Hallelujah!

  Hal-lay-lu . . . jah!

  The pressure control wheel didn’t want to move back the other way, and for a moment I thought everything that had happened was going to be for nothing. The place would blow up anyway.

  But finally, it began to turn.

  I still couldn’t see the gauge—to tell the truth, it was hard to see at all; something was wrong with the shape of things, and the colors seemed to sparkle in a way I didn’t remember—but I kept turning the wheel counterclockwise. Around. And around. And around.

  Until it came off in my hand.

  The sudden explosion of live steam and metal knocked me a dozen feet, and I tripped over Gideon’s body and went down. The wheel was still in my hand and I looked at it stupidly, trying to remember where I had seen it before.

  Hallelujah!

  The choir was still singing, but it seemed to be marching away now, the sound growing fainter and fainter until only the off-key sopranos were audible.

  Hallelujah!

  My head hurt; the skin felt stretched and dry and painful. As though I’d spent too long in the sun.

  My hands hurt, too.

  Time to get off the beach. Or put on some sun oil . . .

  Hallelujah.

  The sound was vanishingly faint; the choir had left the nave and was waiting outside for Benediction.

  I drew breath to bless the day and their prayers.

  But something was wrong with the acoustics. I couldn’t hear my own voice and besides, my sunburn was really beginning to give me a fit. You’d think I’d have had sense enough to let Angela put a little oil on me before it got to that stage.

  Angela?

  I looked around for her, but she had left the beach or something, because the sun was going down—darkness around me except for the red afterglow of the sun around the mouth of the furnace—and wondered how long the choir could hold a minor note like that, waiting for me to speak up.

  A long time, I hoped. Because I couldn’t think of anything to say. Or anyone to say it to.

  Where the hell was God?

  Son of a bitch always sleeping on the job; always screwing off when there was work to do. Leave it to the peons. To the grunts.

  Jesus!

  The Charlies must have come through here like Jimmy-Come-to-Mama; I looked out of my hooch and wondered if Dom Gianelli was all right. Nice guy; I was lucky to have wound up in the same platoon with him.

  Dom?

  I spoke his name aloud, but no one answered and it seemed like a bad idea to give away my position by saying it again. No matter. I would see him in the morning. We were going to flip for the pass to Saigon.

  My hands and face were burning up.

  Someone was lying on the beach beside me. I could see him there, flaked out fully clothed. Funny. Even with the sun going down, I wasn’t sure it made sense to be lying on a beach wearing a white suit. Well . . . mostly white. There was a lot of dirt and blood on it. Filthy. Some kind of bum, maybe.

  I craned my neck to get a look at his face.

  It was a real surprise. Because it wasn’t a man at all. Little boy over there, all dressed up in a white suit. Sweet-looking little kid, all those blond curls, but there was something wrong with the middle of his face. Something sticking out of his nose. Something metallic.

  I tried to focus my eye on it, but it was too much trouble and besides it was too late to be on the beach here in ‘Nam, and I had to find Dom. Right now!

  Dom?

  I looked at the little boy beside me, but he was gone, and Dom was lying there with his eyes closed and his insides bleeding all over the place and he was dead and—oh, Christ fucking Jesus—it was all my fault, and Angela was dead and it was my fault and everyone I ever touched or valued or loved was dead, because everyone always died around me.

  Everyone.

  God, please let me die, too!

  Don’t make me go on living like this. Please . . .

  A hundred years or so later someone began hammering at a door somewhere far away in the darkness and then there was a sound of wood and metal giving way and a moment later the lights above me were turned on and I wasn’t on the beach at all but lying on a dirty floor in some kind of basement.

  I
wondered where it was.

  But before I could frame an answer, there was a babble of voices and I had an inverted view of several people rushing toward me, led by a tall black man with a shaven head.

  His face seemed familiar.

  But I couldn’t remember the name.

  A BENEDICTION

  The Lord bless us and keep us. The Lord make his face to shine upon us and be gracious unto us. The Lord lift up his countenance upon us, and give us peace, both now and evermore.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I had second-degree burns on the scalp and hands, and they kept me under observation at the hospital for a couple of days, but I didn’t mind. If I’d been outside, I’d have had to talk to various levels of law-enforcement personnel backed by lawyers in lock-step platoon, and by the time the doctors were ready to let them at me, the first rush of sensation had died and they had figured out a lot of the answers for themselves.

  The sheriff’s department had taken over police duties in South Bay City, and they were looking for ex–Chief Thurloe Thurmond, who had pulled a gun on Highway Patrol officers who wanted him to take down the roadblock he had erected in the middle of Pacific Coast Highway.

  The sudden eruption of mass insanity at the Temple of the Eternal Flame had attracted a predictable amount of interest among the news media, and the chief’s decision to stem the tide by closing the whole town to “outsiders” had been about as popular as you might expect—so the gun-pointing incident was recorded for posterity by about twenty television cameras, and subsequently picked up by all three networks in a chorus of “California Weirdo” sniggering.

  Footage from the Temple of the Eternal Flame itself, however, never made it to the national audience.

  Too raw.

  The first police officers into the hotel—Thurmond’s finest, acting on his orders—apparently sampled the water or the coffee and went as crazy as the rest, and so did the teams dispatched to find out what had become of them.

  By the time Suleiman arrived at the hotel, fresh from an hour or so of interrogation about the shooting-firebombing affray at the casino, the building was surrounded by police and paramedic units drawn from towns as far away as Long Beach, and the body count had already risen to forty-one—plus a dozen or so probables.