by Jack Yeovil
“The president’s office is keeping a silence on this one, although we are assured that a statement is being prepared. Sources close to President North indicate that he is deeply shaken by the arrest of Dr Proctor, who has been a frequent guest at the White House and is known to be a close friend of the Norths, and was godfather to little Joey North and to Ollie Jr. It has been suggested that the President will instruct the Attorney General to appear for the defence in any trial of Dr Proctor, so important is the doctor’s contribution to the administration considered to be. ‘He’s the only one who really understands the economy,’ President North said in a speech three weeks ago, ‘and I figure it’s safe with him.’ Opponents of the Big Bonus have been issuing handbills and vidmail shots featuring T-H-R scene-of-the-crime photographs from the horrific quadruple cheerleader-slaying in Columbus, Ohio, of last December. The handbills bear the slogan, ‘He did this to Mary Lou, Betty Jo, Crissie Leigh, Rachael-Rose and the United States of America.’
“Sonny Pigg, lead singer of the Mothers of Violence, who last month released a successful solo album dedicated to ‘The Tasmanian Devil,’ has issued a press statement in which he claims that ‘the Devil is a real gone guy, and we should go with the groove for him when the bloodtide comes round. Doc Proc should be made freakin’ Prezz immediamente ’fore we lose this great country o’ ours to godless commies, hogfreakin’ ragheads, vegetarian homosexuals and sovrock faghaggs.’ By a bizarre coincidence, Dr Proctor’s last television appearance was on the popular Musichip Jury show, during which he described Pigg’s ‘Tasmanian Devil’ as ‘the worst piece of ordure ever.’
“Dr Ottokar Proctor, 42, was born in Venice, California, and graduated first in his class from Yale at the age of fifteen. He is a world-renowned expert in Side-Demand Financing, post-Jungian psychology, American-made animated cinema, the history of Italian opera and medieval European history. His publications include Giving It All Away: Modem Money Matters, Sylvester P. Pussycat: A Psycho-Sexual Case Study, After Puccini and The European Currency Unit: Paper Money or Solid Brass? He has been a popular guest in numerous network talkshows, and introduced ZeeBeeCee’s Emmy-award-winning How to Get Rich in 80 Days last year. Through a series of influential papers and reports, Dr Proctor was in the forefront of modem economic theory. ‘America has a lot of assets,’ he claimed in his last speech to congress, ‘we should cash in on them.’ The North administration has reduced personal income tax to virtually nothing, while raising finance through hefty duties on imported items—as you know, a cup of real Nicaraguan coffee now costs $150—and such daring schemes as the leasing-out of America’s armed forces to Canada during the Quebecois uprising.
“Dr Proctor has been kept in seclusion temporarily in the time-locked underground strongroom of the Anchorage branch of the GenTech Nomura Agricultural Loan and Trust Co, and has not as yet been able to confer with his lawyers or issue a public statement. Ms Redd Harvest has made available to this network a volume of evidence that is still being sifted by our experts. However, there would appear to be no chance at this time that the T-H-R conclusion will be proved wrong. As Ms Harvest has said to us over a satellite link, ‘Dr Proctor… he was the Devil all right.’ We’ll bring you more on this upsetting story as it develops. In the meantime, this is Lola, handing you back to the scheduled program.”
But before we get back to Voluptua and the gas jockey from Bixby, Mississippi, here’s a message from GenTech…
V
Through the sand, there was a road. One day, Bonney decided it was time to return to the world of cars and concrete and people. She had learned all that the moon and the sand could teach her, and she must search elsewhere. Eventually, she would kill Seth, but in the meantime she had to change herself. She was a walking weapon already, but Seth had only made her into a rough flint axe. She must hone herself into the likeness of her beloved stiletto. She would only have one shot, and she had to be ready to make it count.
She sat by the road and waited, for three days. The sun and the moon passed overhead, the one beating, the other whispering. She heard the motorsickle coming from twenty miles away, and had time to prepare herself. She stood up on her two legs, and purged the animal from her soul. She must be a human person again. Her face was still crooked, but her body was fully healed now, lithe and strong. She set her torso at a provocative angle on her hips, arched her knee a little, and stuck out her thumb.
The cykesound became a speck on the road, and grew bigger as it approached. From the engine noise, she recognized an Electraglide. Out here, that meant the Maniax were back, or perhaps one of the minor biker gangcults, Satan’s Stormtroopers, the Apple Valley Hogfreakers. She knew what to expect from the cykeman, but she was counting on his not knowing what to expect from her.
The sickle slowed as it approached, and she imagined the biker licking his lips inside his helmet, anticipating a tasty morsel. He was a Maniak all right, flying colours, with a pair of sawn-off pumpguns crossed on his back, and a long braided pigtail whipping out like an epileptic snake from under his horned skidlid.
She was wrong about the biker. He was smarter than most. When he got within twenty yards of her, something spooked him and he gunned the hog, speeding past her. A shower of pebbles fell short of her shin. He punched the air and yelled something as he weaved from side to side across the road, zig-zagging into the distance.
She realized he was expecting to be dodging gunfire. She had been relying on her blade, her teeth and her hands for too long. She had forgotten the sidearm, which she had kept sand-free but not discharged in months.
The next one, she swore, she would shoot for his ve-hickle and leave alive for the predators.
She had to wait four more days. And this time, there was more than one rider…
VI
Duroc had never seen Nguyen Seth like this. Usually, his face was as unreadable as a mummy’s bandage mask. Now, he seemed to be in pain, and the lines on his cheeks were almost cracks. He took off his dark glasses, and Duroc could see points of blood in the Elder’s ancient eyes.
They were in the private library, where Seth kept his books. It was a unique collection of the forbidden, the outre, and the mystical. Duroc thought the library was something very near to Seth’s autobiography. Through the pages of hundreds of books, many famous and some unknown, the undying one could trace his passage down the years. Not since the fire at Alexandria had there been such a concentration of the world’s True Knowledge in one building. Here were the secret histories, the stories behind the stories, the truths so terrible they could only be written as fiction, the chronicles of the insane, the lives of the damned.
Somewhere here were the contributions of Duroc’s ancestors: a series of articles co-written by Pierre Henri Duroc and Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, speculating on the limits of the human mind when confronted with endless pain; some transcripts from the meetings of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, in which the fates of some of the first families of France were decided on a whim; a suppressed account of certain discoveries in a pre-human city that came to light in 19th-century French Equatorial Africa before the Cyclopean stones mysteriously sank into the soft jungle earth; Cauchemar et Fils, Maitres des Mondes Perdues, an unpublished novel by M. Jules Verne that was purchased from the author by a Great-Great-Great-Uncle and consigned to obscurity because it described a steam-driven engine to open up a gateway to a world of dreams that bore a remarkable similarity to a device that the Duroc of the time had indeed developed.
Sitting at his huge desk, surrounded by his books, Seth wore a Chinese robe, embroidered with dragon gods, and a black skullcap. His hands were those of a week-old corpse.
“The girl,” he said, his voice uncommonly thin. “Jessamyn Bonney.”
Duroc remembered. Elder Wiggs had told him all about Spanish Fork. “Jazzbeaux? She must be dead, surely. You took her out into the road and… uh… battered her fatally. That must be an end to it.”
“No,” Seth said,
raising a long-nailed finger, “she is not dead. She is in the desert, changing.”
He pressed his finger to his forehead. “And she is in here. She wore the spectacles, and now some fragment of her is inside my mind, just as some fragment of me is lodged in hers. Tick-tock, tick-tock.”
Duroc was perturbed. Seth rarely talked about the things that set him apart from the rest of mankind.
“And is that serious?”
“Roger, it could jeopardize all we have worked for… everything.”
Duroc remembered the files he had accessed from Bruyce-Hoare in Denver. He made a point of checking up on people who got in the way of the Path of Joseph.
“Jessamyn Bonney. She’s just a girl, a juvenile delinquent.”
Seth’s thin lips assumed a configuration that might have passed for a smile. “She was, Roger, she was. Now, she is turning into something else. Through me, she has been extended. I believe that she may be the focal point through which the Ancient Adversary will try to thwart the designs of the Dark Ones.”
Duroc had barely heard of the Ancient Adversary, but he knew this entity was one of the few Great Unseen Powers that stood in opposition to the Dark Ones, the extra-dimensional masters to whom Nguyen Seth had dedicated his long life. The Ancient Adversary had other names: Harry Half-Moon, Pipsqueak, The Dawn Reptile.
“I made her, Roger. Each man makes the sword which will kill him, and I made Jessamyn Bonney.”
There was something disturbing in all this, beyond the threat to the Great Work. Duroc got the impression that Nguyen Seth was almost proud of the girl he feared. For centuries, no one had come along who could make him afraid. Perhaps the old man found that… stimulating? Exciting? Underneath it all, Seth was still at least partially a man. Duroc could never hope to understand his master fully. That was one of the challenges of his life.
Seth was paging through a book. It was not what Duroc would expect, not the Necronomicon or some volume by Undercliffe or Karswell. It was Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Duroc remembered the story. His uncle had taken him to see the Walt Disney film when he was a child. Could Nguyen Seth be identifying with the boy who never grew up?
“I knew J.M. Barrie, you know. I was there in 1912, when he unveiled the statue of Peter Pan that still stands in a London park.”
Suddenly, it clicked. “Tick-tock, tick-tock! It’s part of the story, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Roger. One of the prophecies. I am Captain Hook and she, the crocodile. She has a part of me inside her, and I know she will come for me some day. I can hear her. She too has a clock ticking inside her.”
“Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.”
Seth’s smile soured, and he shut the book.
“Bring me the head of the crocodile, Roger.”
“I’ll see to it personally.”
“No, you are too important to the Great Work to get sidetracked on this thing. Just make sure you secure the services of some capable people. The longer we wait, the stronger she gets.”
Duroc left Seth in his library. In among the books, there was a long-case clock. As its pendulum swung, it ticked. Second by second, the world crept towards its End.
VII
It was a convoy. An arvee and ten or twelve outriders. The Sandrat recognized the set-up. She had herself travelled with groups like this. It was a gangcult war party. There was a ninety-five percent probability they would be hostile. Gangcults were in the hostility business, after all.
She dredged up her past, recalling the girl who had been Jazzbeaux, who had been a War Chief. The Sandrat assumed the chapter was finished. The business at Spanish Fork had left them dead or gone. That would nullify all the treaties that protected them. There would be an open season on scattered singletons.
She had none of her ’pomp colours left, but she knew she was still recognizable. The eyepatch was a give-away.
They were bearing down fast. There wasn’t time to find a sandhole and hide. She would have to take her chances.
She unflapped her holster, and shifted it round so it hung behind her waist, out of sight.
Maybe they would want a girl for recreational purposes. She could put up with that if it got her to a city, or within reach of a ve-hickle she could scav. It would be no worse than she had lived through before.
The outriders were almost on her. She stuck out her thumb.
It was worse than she could have imagined. The arvee was painted red, white and blue, and had a Statue of Liberty hood ornament. An ice cream truck musichip played “Yankee Doodle.” The point rider wore tight white-and-blue striped pants, a red tailcoat, a dyed white beard and a stars-and-stripes stovepipe hat. On his cyketank was a bright legend, AMERICA? DON’T FREAK WITH IT!
It was the Daughters of the American Revolution, with a few Minutemen thrown in. And they remembered only too well who she was.
The pointrider turned and skidded to a stop, signing to the rest of the convoy to follow suit.
“Well, looky-looky-looky,” said Uncle Sam, “if it ain’t that commie ratskag Jazzbeaux Bonney, late of the Psychopomps, late of the human race. You look like somethin’ the goat wouldn’t rut with…”
The Sandrat stood stiffly, wondering whether she had a chance.
The arvee doors opened up, and the DAR piled out. Miss Liberty was there. She tucked her unlit torch under her arm, and smiled. She had more teeth than a game-show hostess on ZeeBeeCee, and breasts like udders.
“My deah,” she cooed, croaking like Katharine Hepburn, “it’s been sempleah ages…”
The Sandrat didn’t give them any resistance as they took her weapons away from her.
Miss Liberty raised her veil and kissed the Sandrat on the cheeks. The President of the DAR chapter was old for the gangcult game, twenty-three or -four. It must be the politics.
It was late afternoon. The light would be going soon. A couple of Minutemen were binding together two cloth-padded lengths of wood. They got their cross put together and planted in the sand.
“Such a shame about President North’s Big Bonus, wasn’t it?” said Miss Liberty. The Sandrat had no idea what she was talking about. “Well, I’ve always said that Sollie Ollie was just a tad too radical to hold high office in these heah United States.”
A teenage matron squirted gasoline on the cross with a flyspray. Uncle Sam brought out a box of marshmallows and some skewers. Three blonde-haired, freckle-faced children in immaculate overalls, with Old Glory on one tit and the swastika on the other, sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
“I think we’re gonna have us a regular patriotic cook-out here, Madame Prezz,” said Uncle Sam.
Miss Liberty put her arm around the Sandrat. “My deah,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a light, would you?”
The Sandrat spat in her face.
Miss Liberty smiled, and wiped the spittle away with a lace-edged hankie she produced from her sleeve.
“Oh well, nevah mind.”
She took out her torch and twisted it. A jet of flame shot out and fell upon the cross, which caught light immediately.
“It warms your heart, doesn’t it? This used to be a hell of a country, before we started letting red slits like you run loose in the streets frightening the children with their hammers and sickles.”
The children joined hands with Uncle Sam and danced around the burning cross.
The Sandrat was shoved roughly towards the cross. She felt the heat wafting across the evening air towards her.
“I guess what we’ve got here, Jazzbeaux,” Miss Liberty said, “is a triumph for Truth, Justice and the American Way…”
VIII
In the Outer Darkness, the Ancient Adversary waited while the Dark Ones swarmed towards the light. It had long since ceased to define itself except in terms of its enemies. The game that was being played out in the shadows around the planet Earth was old beyond even its understanding. For an eternity, it had been alone against the Dark, unsupported even by the fra
gile hopes of humanity. Now, it was reaching out, spiralling its essence down towards the wormhole in the fabric of the Dark, ready to feed itself into the earthly plane, to become one with the Vessel. It had observed the Vessel from afar, peering through the lens in the moon, tracking the human dot through the sandscape.
Without knowing why, it assumed a ghostshape. Dimensions meant nothing in the Darkness, but it stretched its tail across the shadows, and thrust its snout towards the light. Sharp teeth grew in rows, rough ridges raised across its back. Flat toadlike eyes blinked, watering. There was nothing to see yet, but that would come.
Clawing at the substance of the dark, it wriggled towards the Gateway, squeezing its eternal purpose into the elongated bulb of its lizard brain.
Without knowing why, it talked to itself.
“Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…”
Down on the Earth, the Vessel was waiting, and so was the Prey…
IX
Miss Liberty marched her towards the cross.
“I just want to ask you one question,” the leaderene said.
“Go on,” spat the Sandrat.
“Are you now, or have you evah been, a member of the Communist Party?”
Flames licked the darkening sky. The DAR stood around, waiting for the entertainment. The children had stopped singing, and were lighting cross-shaped sparklers. They waved them around, chanting “burn the commie, burn the commie” until Uncle Sam cuffed one of them around the ear.
The Sandrat felt the old skills coming back. Human speech returned, and her brain raced. “Like the man said in the song, ‘you have nothing to lose but your chains.’”
She twisted out of Miss Liberty’s grip, and sank a foot into the woman’s midriff. The leaderene went down with a satisfying thump, her spiked coronet falling off.