The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack)

by F. Paul Wilson

  But he wondered: Had Dr. Hanley possessed a seething core of violence like his own? Had he managed to lock it away as Jim had?

  He turned his thoughts back to Bill who had been a valued member of the team as well but had never really been one of the gang. When locker-room talk turned away from school and sports and got into who had been the latest to feel up Mary Jo Munsey, Bill faded away. Still, he had been somewhat of a regular guy. He could work miracles with carburetors and would go to parties and CYO dances and dance with the girls, had even dated Carol fairly steadily for a few years. But he had always seemed one step removed from the crowd, always slightly out of tune with everybody else. One of those guys who heard a different drummer.

  Some of the guys would tease him for being such a square, but Jim could never get into that. He had always liked Bill. He had been able to discuss things with Bill that he could not even approach with the other guys. Heavy stuff. Ideas. They both were voracious readers and so they often discussed books. He still remembered the long arguments they'd had over Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged when it first came out. They rarely agreed on anything—that was what made the conversations so stimulating. Bill was always on the up side. Idealman, Jim had called him. And Bill had dubbed him Cynicalman in return.

  Initially Jim had been stunned to learn that Bill Ryan had joined the Jesuit seminary after high school. "I thought you were going to be a mechanic!" he remembered telling him jokingly. But after thinking about it for a while, he had concluded that he should have seen it coming all along. He knew that Bill believed in God and Man, and in Virtue and Decency being their own rewards. Believed it then and believed it now, apparently. There was something refreshing about that in the God Is Dead age.

  And now he was at St. F.'s.

  Funny how things ran in circles.

  "Good to see you laugh, old buddy," Bill said finally.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You've been pretty glum for a guy who's just become filthy rich."

  "Sorry about that," Jim said, knowing it was true and regretting it. He hated being a wet blanket. "Yeah, Hanley attached a lot of money to my name in that will. Just wished he'd attached a couple of extra words along with the dough."

  "Like 'my son'?" Bill said.

  Jim nodded, glad that Bill was tuned into him. That old rapport, that static-free FM wavelength they used to groove on was still working.

  "Yeah. Those would do just fine."

  "I don't think anyone will doubt you're his son."

  "But that's not enough. I need to know it all. What's my nationality? When do I salute or puddle up? Do I stand for the Marseillaise or weep at "Danny Boy"? Should I have a swastika hidden in the bedroom and do secret Sieg Heils every night, or should I be trying a few years in a kibbutz? If I came from Hanley, where the hell did he come from?"

  "Judging from your dietary preferences," Carol said, "you must be part Italian."

  Bill said, "At least you know who your father is. Was. Obviously he never forgot you."

  "Yeah, but he could have legitimized me in print."

  He felt Carol's hand slip over his. "You're legitimate to me," she said.

  "I think you're pretty legit too," Bill said. "What else do you need?"

  "Nothing." Jim couldn't help smiling. "Except maybe figuring out who Mom is."

  Bill glanced heavenward. "Lord, teach this man to let things lie… at least for tonight!" Then he looked straight at Jim. "After that I'll do anything I can to help."

  "Great! What say we blow this place and head for the Village. It's amateur night at the Wha?"

  4

  Café Wha?—Greenwich Village

  Bill shook his head to clear his buzzing ears. The Wha? was a long, narrow room; the stage was set in the center of the left wall. A Lovin' Spoonful-type quartet that billed itself as Harold's Purple Crayon was carting its equipment off the stage to make room for the next act.

  "Loud, but not bad," he said to Jim and Carol. "The harmony was pretty good. And I liked that washboard jug-band number."

  "They're not going anywhere," Jim said, quaffing the rest of his bottle of Schaeffer. "Some Stones, some Spoonful, a little Beatles, a touch of the Byrds. I liked them, but they're not commercial. No definite sound. A mishmash. But better than that first group putting Kahlil Gibran to acid rock. Whoa!"

  Bill couldn't help laughing. "Jim Stevens, World's Toughest Critic! Gibran's not so bad."

  Carol touched his arm. "Let's get back to what you were saying before the band drowned us out. About going up to New Hampshire. Do you really think McCarthy's got a chance in the primary?"

  "I think so."

  He reached for his beer, not because he had to have a sip at that moment, but to remove his arm from contact with Carol's hand. It felt so nice there, so soft and warm, awakening feelings better left asleep. He glanced at her.

  Carol Nevins Stevens: Girl, did I ever have it bad for you. Movies, holding hands, an arm over your shoulder or around your waist, good-night kissing. No further. Puppy love. Now you're a woman and your hair is longer and your figure fuller, but your smile is as dazzling and your eyes are as bright and as blue as ever.

  Bill knew she was going to be a problem. Already was. For a couple of nights now, increasingly erotic thoughts of Carol had kept him awake way past his usual bedtime.

  Through his years in the seminary he had struggled to condition himself into an automatic observance of his vow of chastity. To become, in a sense, asexual. It hadn't been as difficult as he had thought. At first he had taught himself to approach it as a form of daily Spannungsboden, a self-imposed delay between the desire for something and the act of reaching out for that something. Day after day, he would put off today's sexual desires until tomorrow. But tomorrow never came. The Spannungsboden was interminable.

  Over the years it became easier. It had taken time, but now he could reflexively wrap up temptations or potentially troublesome urges and channel them off into oblivion before they could find purchase in his consciousness or his libido.

  So why wasn't it working with Carol? Why hadn't he been able to keep her from wandering in and out of his mind since he had seen her last week?

  Perhaps because Carol was from before. No woman could find a place in his feelings today, but Carol had lived in that private interior garden before he had erected the walls. He had thought his feelings for her long dead and gone, but apparently it wasn't so. There was still life in those old roots.

  Isn't it all foolishness, this celibacy thing?

  How many times had he heard that question—from others, from himself? A hostile someone had even quoted Marx to the effect that it was easy to become a saint if one did not want to be a man. Bill's answer was a shrug. Celibacy was part of the package, part of the commitment he had made to God—you give up power, wealth, sexual involvement, and other distractions in order to focus your energies on God. The self-denial tempers the faith.

  Bill knew the depth of his faith. It infused his heart and soul and mind. He prided himself on being neither a heavenward-gazing ascetic nor an overgrown altar boy. Both his feet were planted firmly in the real world. His was a mature, intellectualized belief that cut through the fairy tales and myths and Bible stories. He had read the lives and works of the saints, and de Chardin, of course, but he had studied Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre as well.

  He had handled them with ease. But could he handle Carol?

  "I don't trust McCarthy," Jim was saying.

  Bill had to laugh. "The return of Cynicalman!"

  "He was never gone," Carol said.

  "Seriously, though," Jim said, leaning forward, "I just don't trust one-issue candidates. In fact, I don't trust candidates, period. The political process seems to corrupt everyone who gets involved. The people who'd make the best candidates lack sufficient bad taste to run for office."

  "I believe Eugene McCarthy's an exception," Bill said. "And I believe he's got a damn good chance of winning in New Hampshire. The Tet offen
sive turned a lot of the country against the war."

  Jim shook his head. "We should clean up our own yards and tend to our own neighborhoods first, then worry about the rest of the world. If we all did that, maybe there wouldn't be so much in the world to worry about. Want another beer?"

  Bill said, "I'd love one."

  "Okay. We'll see what the next band sounds like. If they're awful, I know a quieter place we can go."

  5

  Monroe

  Emma Stevens was roughly yanked out of sleep by the sudden movement beside her. Jonah had bolted upright in bed.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I have to go out!"

  His voice sounded strained, upset. And that frightened her. Jonah never made an abrupt movement, never showed alarm. Everything he did seemed calculated. He seemed to have nerves of insulated copper wire.

  But he was tense now. She could see him sitting there in the dark, his hand cupped over his good right eye, staring into the night with his blind eye as if he were seeing something with it.

  "You've had a vision?"

  He nodded.

  "What's it about?"

  "You wouldn't understand!"

  He leapt from the bed and began to pull on his clothes.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Out. I've got to hurry."

  Emma threw the covers back. "I'll come with you."

  "No!" The word cracked like a whip. "You'll only get in the way! Stay here and wait."

  And then he hurried from the room.

  Emma pulled the covers back over her and shivered. She could not remember the last time she had seen her husband hurry. Yes, she could. It had been back in the winter of 1942… rushing to the orphanage.

  6

  Jonah raced down Glen Cove Road toward the LIE.

  Something terrible is going to happen!

  He wasn't sure how exactly, but the One would soon be in deadly danger. Whether through pure earthly happenstance or through the machinations of the other side, he could not say. He had to hurry, or all his life until now would be made meaningless.

  He pressed a hand over his right eye. Yes… there, to the west, a red glow of danger in his left eye.

  All my life made meaningless…

  It seemed as if he had been preparing for this, for what was happening these days, forever. But it hadn't been forever. Only since he was nine. It was then that he had learned that he was different from others.

  He remembered that day in 1927 when the floodwater had come roaring through their town in what the history books would later call the Great Lower Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster. Up until then he had thought of himself—when he thought of himself at all—as just another normal everyday farm boy. He had burned alive his share of beetles, torn the wings off his share of butterflies, tortured and killed his share of kittens, and enjoyed it all. His folks had been upset with him, and maybe even a little scared of him, but wasn't that what childhood was all about—learning, testing? He assumed all kids experimented as he did, but he didn't know for sure, because he had no brothers and sisters—and no real friends:

  The Great Flood changed all his perceptions and preconceptions.

  Luckily for him, he had been out by the barn when the water hit. The yard had been a sea of mud after days of heavy rain. He heard a roar like a great train rolling on a downgrade, looked up, and across the field he saw the onrushing wall of dirty brown water, swirling madly with debris as it raced toward him.

  He had been able to make it to the giant oak tree that stood in the center of the yard just in time. With the water surging and lapping at his heels, he scrambled up through the lower branches. The thick trunk swayed and groaned at the onslaught of the surging water, but its roots held.

  He heard an explosive crack and turned toward the house. As he watched from his high perch he heard one sharp, high scream from his mother and nothing from his father as his home was flattened and broken into kindling by the wall of water. The barn collapsed and was swept away along with the livestock and the splintered remnants of his house.

  He did not escape unscathed, however. A particularly powerful wave caught his legs and knocked them from the branch that supported him. As he fell, clutching frantically at another branch, a protruding twig pierced his left eye. The pain was a jab of lightning into his brain. He howled in agony but held on, finding new footing and pulling himself beyond the water's reach.

  He reached a high branch and straddled it, cupping the socket of his bloodied, ruined eye, rocking back and forth and retching with the pain that throbbed like a white-hot coal.

  The water rose higher but the tree held firm. As the day faded toward night, so the pain in his eye faded to a dull ache. The torrent slowed to a steady southward current.

  Things, living and otherwise, began to float by: a child screaming in lonely terror as it clung to a rooftop, a woman wailing from a log, drowning cattle, bellowing and gurgling, a man leaping from some floating debris and swimming for Jonah's tree, only to miss it and be carried away out of sight.

  Young Jonah, high and dry, watched them all with his good eye from the safety of his perch in the oak. By all rights he should have been terrified, should have been racked with grief and horror at the loss of his home and parents, should have been speechless and near catatonic with his own injury and the scope of the death and destruction around him.

  But he was not. If anything, he was just the opposite. He found himself energized by the disaster. He clung to the branches and avidly watched as each corpse, each struggling survivor, passed by. And when dark had fallen completely, he hung on to the sounds of the night, each cry of misery and pain, each howl of terror, drawing strength from them.

  The hurt and fear of others was like a balm to his own pain, draining it away. Never had he felt so strong, so alive!

  He wanted more.

  To his dismay, the waters receded too rapidly. Soon a boat came by and the soldiers upon it picked him from his branch like a stranded kitten. They took him to a church in the highlands that had been converted to a makeshift hospital where they patched his left eye and laid him down to rest.

  But he couldn't rest! He had to be up and about, had to roam, had to drink in all the destruction, the loss, the death. He wandered the ruins along the edge of the slowly receding waters. He found children crying for their parents, for their brothers and sisters, grown-ups weeping for their mates, for their children. He found hundreds of dead animals—dogs, cats, cows, goats, chickens—and occasionally a dead person. If no one was in sight, he'd poke the dead folks with a stick to see if he could puncture their bloated remains.

  The air was so heavy, so oppressive with misery, it was all he could do to keep from screeching with ecstatic laughter.

  But he knew he had to keep quiet, had to look glum and lost like everyone else. Because he knew then that he was different from the people around him.

  Different from everyone.

  After that it took him years of trial and error, but he learned to hide his differentness from the world. Eventually he found legal, even productive ways to keep his hungers in check. And over the years he came to learn that he had traded one sort of sight in his left eye for another. It was that sight that had wrenched him from his sleep tonight.

  His good eye blazing, he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  7

  The Back Fence, Greenwich Village

  Carol watched with relief as Jim returned from a quick trip to the rest room. She and Bill had had the table to themselves for a few moments and the atmosphere had become strained. Bill seemed so uptight when he was alone with her.

  "How about another round?" Jim said.

  Carol didn't want another drink—she had switched to Pepsi a while ago—and she didn't want Jim to have another, either. She wanted to say something, but not in front of Bill— anything not to sound like a nagging wife in front of Bill. So she held off.

  Besides, he hadn't mentioned warts yet.

  "One mo
re," Bill said. "Then it's time to go."

  They've both got hollow legs! she thought. Where were they putting it all?

  "Carol?" Jim said, pointing at her glass.

  She glanced down at the flat brown liquid that was nearing room temperature now, at the thin oily scum on its surface— Who's their dishwasher?—and decided to stick with what she had.

  "I'm fine. And so are the two of you, I'd think."

  "Nah!" Jim said with a laugh. "We're just getting started!"

  He ordered two more beers, then turned back to Bill, pointing a finger at him.

  "Quick! 'Theology is anthropology.' "

  "Uh…" Bill squeezed his eyes shut. "Feuerbach, I think."

  "Right. How about, 'We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all.' "

  "Bonhoeffer."

  "I'm impressed!" Jim said.

  "Do I detect a common thread in those quotes? Is the Village Atheist trying to make a point?"

  Carol let her mind drift off. She might as well have been home in Monroe for all the attention they were paying her. It was quieter here in the Back Fence, at the corner of Bleecker and something. No live music, just records. "Boogaloo Down Broadway" was thumping softly in the background at the moment. The relative quiet had got Bill and Jim talking and they'd been going at it like two college freshmen debating the meaning of life, of everything!

  Maybe it was a male thing. Male bonding—wasn't that what they called it?

  Bill looked at her and smiled beatifically, obviously more comfortable with her now that Jim was here. He seemed to be at peace with himself. A man who knew himself, an idealist who was sure that he was doing exactly what he wanted with his life. She was certain there were ambitions and dissatisfactions bubbling under the surface there, but she detected none of the wild turmoil she knew to be raging within her husband, James the Skeptic, skewerer—was there such a word?—of Current Wisdom and Common Knowledge.