by John Shirley
He went to the phone and called Data Digs and made an appointment. Then he called Madelaine. She wasn’t home. He left a message on her answering machine, asking her to have dinner that evening. He hung up, but before he’d taken his hand from the receiver, the phone rang, making his hand tingle.
He couldn’t bring himself to lift the receiver to his ear. He was afraid to. He wasn’t at all sure what it was he was afraid of. Was it Gribner? Gribner had to be dealt with sooner or later. Maybe he’d had a breakthrough. Lanyard forced himself to pick up the phone.
“Okay…Yeah—hello.”
“Lanyard?” The voice sounded distant. High-pitched. Maguss.
Lanyard groaned inwardly. “Right.”
“Lanyard, I’ve decided it might be a good idea if we met, face to face.”
“What?” Lanyard was surprised. He sat up straighter on the chair. “You’re taking a plane?”
“I already have. I’m in town.”
“In town?” Lanyard felt a chill. “Sounds like a long distance connection.”
“It’s a car phone. I’m in an associate’s car. Ah…can you meet me at my hotel for lunch? I’m at the Waldorf.” He didn’t wait to see if Lanyard was prepared to meet him. “At one this afternoon. All right? Suite 32Y.”
Maguss hung up.
Lanyard sighed and went to the kitchen. He put two raw eggs in a glass, half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, tomato juice, and a finger of vodka. He mixed it up, steeled himself, and drank. He shuddered. Then he slipped into his coat, and headed out to Data Digs, determined to read a morning paper on the way, no matter how sick it made him.
SCHMALTZ ELEGANCE, LANYARD thought, waiting at the door to Maguss’s suite. He stared at the gold painted trimming on the white door and thought:
One step above the Valencia Hotel. But only one.
The door opened. “Mr. Maguss, please. Tell him Carl Lanyard—”
“I’m the very fellow,” said the little man. Lanyard had taken him for a servant.
“Oh,” said Lanyard, at a loss. “Sorry.” It wasn’t the way Maguss was dressed that made Lanyard mistake him for a servant; the old man was wearing an expensive three-piece dusty-blue wool worsted herringbone suit, over a cotton shirt with barrel cuffs and a sporty dotted tie that was probably Yves St. Laurent. But Maguss was diminutive physically and diminuendo in tone, and at first he seemed shy and humble—a contrast to his phone personality. Which may have been why his employees generally were not allowed to meet him face to face.
And that face.
“William Burroughs!” Lanyard blurted.
Maguss raised a white eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?” he piped. “I don’t resemble the man at all.”
“I guess not,” Lanyard said, feeling awkward. Privately, he thought that Maguss looked remarkably like Burroughs. The lined deadpan face was ashen, the lips thin, the eyes like stones of a sunken temple only just brought to light. Pale blue eyes, full of distance.
He was much older than Lanyard had thought. He was stooped, and his white hands, spotted with age, trembled slightly as he gestured Lanyard into the suite.
But Maguss moved with energy as he closed the door and sat at the table laid out with food in the center of the living room. The furniture was not antique, but was designed to seem that way; there were framed copies of Revolutionary War woodcuts on the walls. He sat in a wooden chair across from Maguss. “Go right ahead and have something to eat, my boy, before your stomach growls something rude at me.” There it is, Lanyard thought. The old man’s acerbic sense of humor. It grated on Lanyard.
Lanyard was hungry, but his stomach fluttered nervously. On the white tablecloth, symmetrically arranged, were covered china dishes. When he looked up, Maguss had somehow already filled his plate, and was eating rather greedily for an old man. They ate shrimp, liver pâté, and lemoned salmon. Somehow Lanyard expected servants. There were none, and he filled his wineglass repeatedly with the Chablis. Lanyard twitched nervously at the noises Maguss made with his fork against the plate. The clicks and ringings seemed painfully loud.
Worry about Madelaine nagged at him. She was never home when he called. He didn’t trust Minder; the man was a born exploiter.
Lanyard glanced up at Maguss. The old man was now noisily eating his dessert. He still hadn’t said a word.
What the hell does he want with me? Lanyard wondered. But he began to feel better, more relaxed, as the wine took hold.
So he only twitched a little when Maguss said, suddenly, not looking up from his mousse, “And how is our old friend Madelaine?”
Lanyard managed to keep himself from saying: You’ve never met her, she’s no old friend of yours.
“She’s fine, last I heard of her. I haven’t been in touch with her.”
“You’ve been dating her.” He didn’t say it accusingly.
“How do you know that?” And Lanyard was speaking accusingly.
“I have informers working for Joey Minder. Minder doesn’t know they work for me too. They told me you were recently her escort to Minder’s club.”
“Informers? Why? Are you in competition with Minder? He’s going into publishing?”
“No. And I’m not going into theatrical production or nightclubs. Let’s just say that Minder and I are old competitors. We simply don’t like one another.”
“He’s not someone I’d trust to scrub my back in the showers, either,” Lanyard said into his third glass of wine.
His tired eyes were playing tricks on him. He thought he saw something sliding through the air like a flying eel; something glimpsed from the corners of his eyes. He turned to look at it directly and found nothing.
“Let’s sit on the couch,” said Maguss, rising. He stretched, and walked with energetic but mincing steps toward the sofa.
Lanyard sat in an armchair across from the sofa. He badly wanted a cigarette, and he almost hated Maguss when the old man said, “Cigarette?” He nodded toward a coffee table holding a carved-ivory cigarette case. The carving on the case showed the head of a Japanese demon, rather like the demon he thought he’d seen in the water stain on the ceiling over his bed. With a practiced flick of his thumb, Maguss opened the case and extracted a custom-made cigarette.
Lanyard shook his head slowly, watching enviously as Maguss lit up. The purple-blue smoke smelled like fine Turkish tobacco. Lanyard nervously fingered the dimple in his chin.
“I wonder if you’d be kind enough, Carl, to tell me a little bit about yourself.” Maguss spoke languidly, staring at the ceiling.
For no conscious reason, Lanyard glanced up at the ceiling. For a moment he thought, again, that he glimpsed a gliding, elongated shape in the air. He’d experimented with psychedelics more than once; maybe he was getting a flashback.
His eyes watered; he looked away. Nothing up there.
“What sort of…what would you like to know? You know I’m divorced, and all that’s in my files. I—”
“For instance: In what religion were you raised?”
Reminding himself that there was more than a hundred thousand dollars remaining at stake, Lanyard didn’t say, Why the hell do you want to know?
“I was raised a Methodist,” he replied. “A very liberal atmosphere, really. We didn’t go to church regularly after I was thirteen or so. My mother was a painter. And my father was a gloomy, antisocial old cuss. He taught law at U. of C. Which is probably why I know so little about the law.”
“Your father is still alive?”
“Yeah. We’re not really in touch. My mother died and—”
He shrugged.
Out of the blue, Maguss asked, “Have you noticed anything new in the way of psychic phenomena around Madelaine Springer?”
Trying to smile, Lanyard asked, “Is that supposed to catch me off guard so I blurt out a confidence, or what?”
Maguss gave his rasping chuckle. Lanyard felt a chill.
“No, Carl, I was just curious. Professional curiosity. You may have quit the magazine, but I ha
ven’t.”
“It’s just that I thought you had given me different priorities now.”
“I have, I have indeed. But my question about Madelaine is not necessarily irrelevant. I firmly believe there are psychic phenomena to be noticed when one is with Ms. Springer. I have, as I said, my sources. And if you are able to perceive those phenomena, then it could be that your block is lifting. And—” he paused to tap his cigarette on a marble ashtray”—if your block is lifting, then it could be that you will perceive in the way you were intended to, which would help us find the source of—”
“Pardon me,” said Lanyard, rather more harshly than he’d intended, “but you seem to be talking to someone who isn’t here. Because I sure as hell don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Good.” Maguss smiled. “Then we’re both confused. Lovely. Confusion makes things interesting. Just the other day I saw a confused man walk into a wall. He took a rather comical spill. I had a good laugh over that. Made the day more interesting.”
Lanyard waited out Maguss’ sense of humor in silence.
“What I was talking about,” Maguss said, “was a report I read on you. It came from your grade school. It was old and yellowed, and if we hadn’t rescued it, it would have gone to their incinerator. They were cleaning their files.”
“What report?” Lanyard said, almost whispering.
“It was a report that said you complained about hearing voices. Hearing voices and seeing things. You pointed at things that weren’t there. The principal was of the opinion that you were trying to draw attention to yourself. He accused you of that, and you lost your temper. You told him he was a—” Maguss paused to rasp a chuckle. “—a ‘pimplebrain.’ Very colorful description, I thought. He shouted at you and made you stay after school. Later, there is, in the same file, an angry note from your mother saying that you had to stay home from school because the school grounds hadn’t been adequately policed and as a consequence you were rather severely beaten by two bigger boys after school.”
Lanyard winced. “I will have that cigarette now, if you don’t mind.” He extracted a cigarette from the box and lit it with Maguss’s bone-handled lighter; he inhaled and coughed. He wasn’t used to it.
Maguss glanced to one side, his eyes narrowing. For a moment he looked like a cat following the course of a fly in the air. Lanyard automatically looked in the same direction and thought he saw something flutter there, something dark and slippery. Then it was gone. No fly. Something else.
The hand that held the cigarette trembled, shaking a few tiny ashes adrift on the air.
Lanyard couldn’t contain himself. “I don’t know who you bribed to get those files, and I don’t know much about the law. But your reading them was an invasion of my privacy. I know that much.”
Maguss spread his hands apologetically. “I’m sorry, my boy. But, you see, I’m a compulsive researcher. I had to research your childhood, once I began to suspect you. I’m the publisher of a magazine that, after all, is devoted to—”
“I don’t really see what this has to do with psychic phenomena. I am afraid I’m not really following you.” Lanyard’s interruption was desperate. He had stopped thinking. He was pure defense. He felt he was under attack as surely as if a mugger had jumped him with a sawed-off baseball bat. “I think it would be more pertinent if we talked about the killings. You asked me to investigate them. You haven’t said a damn word about them. I’ve put in some real work. For example, the one thing that links them all is the fact that they happen underground and of course there is the nearly identical methodology. The methodology—” Lanyard was speaking in machine-gun bursts, trying to keep Maguss from saying any more about the reports from his grade school—“indicates that the cult is interested in placating Ahriman and exchanging sacrificed life-energy for prosperity, good luck or what have you. The cult has its origins in a Persian tradition that stipulates its temple must be underground. So, I’ve gone to a data-researching place and paid them to collate anything that comes along concerning unusual events linked with the city’s underground…anything involving subways, or cellars or—”
He stopped. He couldn’t go on, when Maguss was so openly laughing at him.
The laughter was the silent sort, but it was real. As Lanyard rose angrily and turned to go, Maguss took a deep breath and said, “If you’re through hedging now, Lanyard, I’ll finish what I was trying to tell you. Let me see—”
Feeling limp all at once, Lanyard turned and sank into his seat.
Maguss was saying, “I believe I was telling you about suspicion. My suspicion of you. I suspected that your relentless skepticism about the occult demonstrated that you were afraid of it. Just as a homophobic man is probably a suppressed homosexual. You were afraid of the occult, of psychic phenomena. So you stuck with the magazine to have the opportunity to debunk it. You made yourself forget your boyhood ‘hallucinations.’ It was a trauma—and all of us cloud over the traumas in our lives.”
Lanyard stared at him. “You sonuvabitch,” he breathed.
“Yes,” said Maguss thoughtfully. “I am. Anyway, I want you to know that your time for self-recognition has come. You have to recognize that at least part of your attraction to Madelaine is the result of your understanding that she is that rarity, the genuine psychic. Your Gift is trying to emerge in you—fighting off your suppression. Through Madelaine. Just a theory,” he added airily. “You’re a psychic, Lanyard. But your Gift isn’t the same as Madelaine’s. Because you can hear the Otherworld only occasionally. More often, you can see it.”
Lanyard hardly heard him. He was distracted. He couldn’t take his eyes from the black, sinuous forms writhing into being in the air over Maguss’s head.
They almost took shape. And then they were gone.
“The process has only just begun,” Maguss was saying. “If I know the pattern, it will come in fits and starts. When it begins to show itself in you more fully, you may be able to use it to trace the power currents. If you can trace the power currents, one of them will lead you to the temple of the people you seek. So you see, the subject was not irrelevant.”
“I am of the opinion,” Lanyard said in a monotone, controlling his voice very deliberately, “that you are a senile old man, suffering hallucinations. I seem to be having a few myself. I haven’t had enough sleep.” He stood. “I’m going to go home and get some. If you want to fire me for what I’ve just said, you can, of course. But if you don’t, I’ll continue the investigation,…because, in all candor, I need the money.”
“You’re welcome to your opinions, Lanyard,” said Maguss.
Lanyard realized that the old man was again silently laughing at him.
“And,” Maguss added, “you’re not fired, no. I brought you here to help apprise you of your situation. To pry your Third Eye open a little. I think you’ll see that—”
“I’m not buying it, thanks. Are you going to stay here for a while?”
“For an indefinite period, yes. Right here.” Maguss smiled.
Lanyard took another cigarette, lit it, moving robotically, and turned away.
In the elevator, going down, he felt overwhelmed. “I’ll continue the investigation” he’d said, “because, in all candor, I need the money.”
But he knew perfectly well it wasn’t the money he was after, now.
GRIBNER TYPED OUT his report.
“I can find no evidence,” he wrote, “that an animal of any sort, except for the victimized dogs…” He paused and said, “Hell.”
He got up from his desk. The clatter of typewriters clicking and desk drawers banging and phones jangling from the adjoining room was abrasive. Sometimes the noise seemed to merge and shape itself into a single sound.
He opened his file drawer, and in the alphabetized section, under “C”—C for Consolation—he found a flask of brandy.
He poured two fingers into his instant coffee.
He sat at the desk, knocked back two quick slugs of this caustic brew,
shuddered, clapped the cup down so that it sloshed onto the papers in the corner of his desk, and returned his attention to the typewriter.
“I can find no evidence that an animal of any sort, except for the victimized dogs…” he read, and shrugged. He added, “…was present at the scene. The basement floor, which was dirt, was completely free of footprints except for the boy’s. I was the first one down there with a flashlight, and it’s the first thing I looked for. Hell, I—”
He stopped and stared at the report. He’d written Hell, I on an official report. Hands shaking, he carefully erased it. He took another swig of his laced coffee, and wrote, “Additionally, the medical examiner found no trace of saliva in the wounds on the child’s remains.” He hesitated. Would it confuse the issue if he mentioned that nevertheless the examiner had insisted that the wounds were made by an animal’s teeth and fangs?
It was then that Gribner made up his mind to be taken off the case. He wasn’t sure what had made up his mind. He only knew he couldn’t do the job right—not like this. He’d been looking for an excuse to quit. Screw excuses. He’d make them take him off the case.
He wanted to be relieved of the case so he could follow it. So he could pursue his own private, nonofficial investigation. So he could find Everett. “It’s you, you little bastard,” he muttered. “You’re one of them.”
“NO, MISS CHANCERY,” said Tooley, “it is not hypnotism. It is kind of—ah…”
“You’re telling me it’s not hypnotism? I start feeling like I should do everything you suggest. I don’t really even remember coming here…and then you want me to sit and watch this TV…and I start watching it and—well, if it’s not hypnotism, what is it?”
“It is,” said Tooley, “merely a harmless and inexpensive means of teaching something complicated in a short time.”