“How am I supposed to do that?”
“I have no idea. And whatever happens won’t raise your standing with your fellow Kickers here, nor will it alter the course of your disease. But I may have an option for you in the latter regard.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I repeat my initial request: May we come in?”
Darryl waved them in. “Yeah, sure, whatever.”
Drexler stepped inside, followed by Hank who closed the door behind them.
“Darryl,” Drexler said, “I believe your AIDS can be cured.”
“That’s what the medical grifters say, but you and I know it ain’t so.”
“I am not offering an alternative crackpot therapy. I believe I can offer the real thing.”
Darryl stared at him. “You can cure AIDS? Yeah? Fuck you.”
“I’m quite serious. But I don’t mean that I can do it personally. I’m referring to the Orsa.”
Darryl laughed—and had to admit it wasn’t a nice sound.
“You’re telling me that overgrown jelly bean in the basement can cure AIDS? You must take me for some sort of royal, world-class dumbass.”
“Well, not the Orsa itself, but . . . remember the dark streak you saw inside it? It is an ancient, special compound. That holds the cure.”
Darryl shifted his gaze from Drexler to Hank. “This true?”
Hank shrugged. “I know as much as you do. I just heard about this a few minutes ago.”
Back to Drexler. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch. Tradition has it—”
A phone started ringing. Drexler pulled his cell from his pocket and stared at it, frowning.
“Excuse me. I must take this.”
He stepped out into the hall and lowered his voice, but Darryl could still hear him.
“Finally, some good news . . . Waste no time. I want you to see him immediately. Yes, you personally . . . I don’t care about that. You go see him, take whoever you wish, do whatever necessary to learn what he knows, then end this . . . yes, that’s just what I mean. I want this over and done with today. Today, is that clear? . . . Good.”
Drexler returned, looking less distracted.
“Where was I? Oh, yes. Tradition has it that the compound within the Orsa holds the cure to all diseases.”
“Riiiiiight.”
Drexler’s turn to shrug. “I can but quote tradition: ‘A night spent upon the Orsa compound will heal all wounds, cure all ills.’ ”
Darryl snorted. “Yeah. Like they had AIDS back then.”
“ ‘All ills’ is fairly comprehensive, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. But ‘a night spent’? What’s that about?”
“You must spread the compound upon the surface of where you lie”—he pointed to Darryl’s bed—“and sleep upon it. Spread it on your sheet.”
“What? That’s crazy!”
“Hey, Darryl,” Hank said. “What’s the downside?”
“Sleeping on some kinda dirt? You do it!”
Hank’s expression was grim. “I’ve already done it—when I was down and out. And I’m not the one who’s going to be out on the street tomorrow.”
Yeah, well, there was that. One thing he didn’t get, though . . . He looked at Drexler. “Why are you doing this? You don’t care about me. You’re always trying to get me out of the room. Now you want to help? I don’t get it.”
“It is true I have tended to lose patience with you at times, but that doesn’t mean I dislike you or wish you ill. Did I not arrange medical care for you as soon as I saw those suspicious lesions on your skin? I know you are valuable to Mister Thompson, and when I heard that he was being forced to evict you, I felt I had to act.”
“He’s offering you a chance, Darryl. This whole Orsa thing is so weird, it just might work.”
Hank and Drexler stood before him, silent, waiting. City sounds drifted in from the street below as Darryl tried to make up his mind.
Seemed crazy, but what if it worked? How could he refuse? And even if it didn’t, he couldn’t see much downside except . . .
Except that Drexler was offering it. Darryl knew he didn’t give a shit about him. He remembered the look on his face yesterday morning when he’d seen those spots. His interest had seemed almost gleeful and . . . calculating.
Maybe it was nothing more than seeing Darryl as a guinea pig, a chance to try out the cure-all dust. If it worked, he’d have struck gold—a license to print money. And Darryl . . . Darryl would be cured.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it. Bring it on. Bring me this stuff and I’ll bed down with it.”
“It’s not quite so simple as that,” Drexler said. “There’s a condition . . .”
10
“There?” Weezy said as they approached the canopied entrance to the apartment building on Central Park West. “He lives there?”
Jack checked the address on the napkin: 34 CPW.
“That’s what he gave me.”
She stopped in her tracks. “I can’t go in there like this. I mean, look at me.”
She wore the same T-shirt and sweatpants as last night. No surprise. They were all she had left.
“You look fine.”
She shook her head, looking around. “I’ve got to go buy something else. Of course, I’ve got no money.”
Jack could front her whatever it cost, but that wasn’t the point.
“You’ve got no time, either. He said one o’clock, and it’s that now.” He took her arm and pulled her forward. “He’s not going to mind.”
“You said you met him only a few months ago, and you never even knew where he lived until now, so how can you say he won’t mind?”
Jack took a breath. He knew he’d have to be breaking the truth to her soon. Might as well be now.
“Because he’s from the First Age.”
She laughed. “So he’s got no fashion sense, right? If that’s supposed to make me feel better . . .” She looked at him, studying his expression. “Wait, you are kidding, right? You don’t expect me to . . . ?”
“Not kidding.”
“But the First Age was supposed to be twelve, fifteen thousand years ago.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you’re telling me we’re going to visit an immortal.”
“Former immortal. He started aging about the time World War Two started.”
She stopped and stared at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you.”
He pointed to the backpack slung over his right shoulder. “Completely. I even brought the Compendium of Srem along.”
He watched her lips try to smile but they never quite made it.
“This isn’t funny, Jack. You’ve always made fun of the Secret History, and that’s okay. But this is . . . I don’t know . . . mean.”
He took her arm and guided her toward the door. “I’d never be mean to you, Weezy. You’ve got to believe that.”
“Strangely enough, I do. But you’re telling—”
“That the Secret History is real and I’m taking you to a guy who’s lived it—the whole thing.”
She said nothing as they stepped up to the liveried doorman.
“Mister Veilleur?”
He smiled and touched the brim of his cap. “Who shall I say is calling?”
“Jack and Louise.”
He turned and held the door for them. “He’s expecting you. Top floor.”
“Which apartment?” Jack said.
The doorman smiled. “There’s only one.”
“Only one?” Weezy whispered as they approached the elevator. “He has the whole floor?”
“I imagine he’s made a few good investments over the last few thousand years.”
Once in the elevator and on their way up, Jack pulled the Compendium from the backpack. Its covers and spine were made of some sort of metal stamped with letters and symbols.
“Careful,” he said as he handed it to her. “It’s heavy.”
She took i
t with both hands and stared at the cover. Jack remembered the first time he’d seen it, and knew what she was experiencing: The cover at first would seem decorated with two lines of meaningless squiggles, then they’d blur and morph into English. Two words. Compendium ran across the upper half in large serif letters; below it, half size, was Srem.
She gazed a moment then looked up at him with an awed expression.
“Then it’s true . . . it’s true what they said about the text.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah. It changes into the reader’s native language.” He smiled. “And it’s got capitalizitosis—big into uppercasing first letters. The Infernals and the One and the Adversary and the Ally . . . you’ll see.”
She opened it to a random page. “Ohmygod, Jack. Ohmygod! You weren’t joking. This is it, really it!” Her eyes widened. “But then that must mean that Mister Veilleur is really . . .”
“From the First Age. Yeah.”
He loved the look on her face, a desperate desire to believe battling a fear to commit to that belief, because here was proof of everything she had studied and pieced together and intuited since her teens.
The elevator doors slid open then and the man himself stood there smiling.
“Welcome,” he said, extending his hand to her. “Louise Connell, I believe.”
Weezy stood frozen, clutching the Compendium against her chest as she stared at him.
“Weez, you okay?” Jack said as the moment lengthened.
“Mister Foster?” She looked at Jack. “You didn’t say he was Mister Foster!”
What the hell was she talking about?
And then he saw it. How had he missed it? He’d met this man once in his boyhood, but he’d been known then as the reclusive Old Man Foster who owned a piece of the Pinelands near Jack’s hometown.
“Are you?” he said. “I had no idea.”
Veilleur nodded, his blue eyes twinkling. “It’s been decades, and I’ve aged since then.”
Still clutching the Compendium, Weezy managed to shake hands with him.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “I have someone else waiting to see you. It’s going to be like old home week, I fear.”
He was a big man, and his bulk had blocked their view of most of the rest of the apartment. But when he stepped aside they saw an elderly woman in a long black dress. She carried a cane and wore a black scarf around her neck. Beside her sat a three-legged dog.
Jack and Weezy spoke in unison.
“Mrs. Clevenger!”
Unlike Mr. Foster—Veilleur—she hadn’t aged a day. She and her dog had been something of a fixture around their hometown of Johnson when they were kids. She’d kept pretty much to herself and had been rumored by some to be a witch. By the time they finished high school she’d moved away.
But of course she wasn’t a witch, she was . . .
“The Lady!” Jack said. “That was you all along?”
She nodded.
I’m an idiot, he thought.
All these women with dogs traipsing in and out of his life and he never connected them with Mrs. Clevenger. Maybe he should have been less adamant about deserting his past and never looking back, because lately the past seemed to be inundating his present.
Weezy was staring at Mrs. C. “How can this be?” She turned to Jack. “You obviously know more about this than I do.”
“Not as much as you think.” He looked at the Lady. “I have a feeling today’s the day you’re going to bring me into the loop. Am I right?”
She nodded. “It is time, I think.”
Way past time as far as Jack was concerned.
11
Weezy’s mind whirled. Or maybe reeled was more like it.
They sat in the apartment’s great room, its huge windows overlooking Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. She didn’t know much about décor, but knew this place was way out of date. Guys from Interior Design would fight over the chance to do an extreme makeover. But she kind of liked it the way it was, with its dark paneling and strange curios and odd melange of mismatched paintings from all over and, perhaps, all time. A tray of sandwiches—homemade from the look of them—sat in the middle of a table set with crystal and china.
All very nice, except she was seated across from Mrs. Clevenger, a woman who had been elderly when Weezy was a kid, and should have passed on by now, but who looked not a day older than when she’d last seen her. Jack seemed to know her as someone else. He’d called her “the Lady.”
And Mrs. Clevenger was seated next to the man she’d recognized as Old Man Foster, who had aged, but was going by the name of Veilleur. She wondered how Jack hadn’t recognized him. Older, sure, but still a big man like Foster, and the blue eyes and high cheekbones were the same; even the beard was the same shape, though fully gray now.
Mr. Veilleur had announced at the beginning that he might have to excuse himself if his wife needed him. Apparently he’d given the help the afternoon off so they could have privacy.
When Weezy had asked if his wife would be joining them the old man said she was not having a good day.
She got the impression that Mrs. Veilleur didn’t have many good days.
So . . . already surreal with Mrs. Clevenger and Mr. Foster—Veilleur—there, but then Jack had launched into this tale of a cosmic shadow war between two vast, unimaginable, unknowable cosmic forces. They had no names, just the labels humans had attributed to them: the Ally and the Otherness.
She’d stifled a yawn. The old tale of Good versus Evil vying for control of Earth or humanity—its oh-so-valuable souls or bodies, or whatever. The same tale that every human culture had invented and reinvented through the ages. She’d heard it all before.
Or thought she had until Jack explained that Earth’s corner of reality was not the grand prize, just a piece—and not a particularly valuable one—on a vast cosmic chessboard . . . part of a contest between the two forces, with victory going to the one that could take and keep the most pieces. Commonly referred to as the Conflict, no one knew who was winning.
But these forces weren’t so simple as Good and Evil. More like neutral and inimical. The Ally was an ally only in so far as humanity’s purposes were in tune with its agenda, which it ruthlessly pursued. It would squash whatever got in its way with no more thought or concern than a human would give to swatting an annoying fly. As long as Earth’s corner of reality stayed in the Ally’s pocket, humanity could count on benign neglect.
The Otherness was another story. It was decidedly inimical because, in a sense, it devoured worlds, changing their realities, even their physics to an environment more to its liking. Almost vampiric in that it seemed to feed on the agonies it caused along the way. Humans shouldn’t take this personally—it did this wherever it gained control.
“The Conflict,” Jack said, “is what’s been fueling the Secret History.”
Weezy glanced at Mr. Veilleur and Mrs. Clevenger and found them nodding agreement.
She’d always suspected something like this, but to hear it from Jack, of all people . . .
She turned to him. “How do you know all this?” She pointed to the Compendium—how she hungered to dive into it—where it sat on a side table. “And how did you get hold of that?”
“Jack is one of the Heirs,” Veilleur said.
“Heirs to what?”
“To the position I held for thousands of years—leading the Ally’s forces against the Otherness.”
“Jack?”
She almost laughed, but that was because she was thinking of the teenage Jack. Then she remembered how he’d killed five men over the course of a dozen hours and it didn’t seem so ludicrous. The sweet, faithful Jack she’d snuggled up to in the bed—what had she been thinking?—had turned into a cold-eyed killer when threatened, and was now back to easygoing, affable Jack.
Two Jacks, polar opposites . . . how did they coexist?
She stared at him. “Really?”
“Really,” Jack said, sounding none too happy about it.
>
His expression made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with the job.
“It’s a long, long story,” Veilleur said. “Back in the First Age, when the Conflict was out in the open, the Ally’s forces prevailed after a seemingly endless string of battles. As it retreated, the Otherness triggered a worldwide cataclysm that wiped out all civilization. Humanity had to start from scratch again. I was made immortal and put on guard, because the Otherness had not given up. It had its own immortal at its disposal, and we battled through the millennia. In the fifteenth century I finally trapped him and locked him away—for good, I thought. But on the eve of World War Two, the German army released him. I slew him before he could escape.
“At that moment, with its victory seemingly complete, the Ally released me to age. It retreated, turning its attention to hotter spots in the Conflict. But the Adversary was not finished. He was reincarnated in 1968. In response, Jack and a few others like him were conceived and prepared to take up the role of Defender should that become necessary. So far it hasn’t. We hope to keep it that way.”
She stared at him. “Jack . . . you’re immortal?”
He shook his head. “Hardly. And not going to be if I have anything to say in the matter.”
“How . . . how long has this been going on?”
The Lady said, “The Conflict began before the Earth was formed and will continue long after the Sun’s furnace goes cold.”
Weezy closed her eyes as she felt the facts and ideas and suspicions and suppositions that had filled her brain shift and expand and form new patterns. Because if all this was true—and she sensed it was—it explained so much.
And now, more than ever, she was certain that the nine/eleven attacks were part of the Secret History, which meant ultimately part of the Conflict.
But the what and how and why remained elusive.
“Okay,” Jack said, “we know who I am, we know who Weezy is, and we know Mister Veilleur.” He leveled his gaze at Mrs. Clevenger. “But who are you?” He held up a hand. “And please don’t tell me you’re my mother. I thought you were many, but was told you were only one. You’re the Lady. I thought then that you might be Gaia or Mother Earth or something like that, but you said it wasn’t that simple. So what’s the truth? You’ve popped in and out of the entire course of my life. I think it’s time I knew the truth.”
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