by Jack Yeovil
“One move, Otto…” Gilhooly stood behind the man in the chair, his gun cocked and pointed at Dr Proctor’s pineal gland. “I’d like it, you know.”
Dr Proctor leafed through the Jessamyn Bonney data.
“Hmmn. Interesting girl. What’s her score?”
“Nowhere near, Ottokar,” said Wicking. “You don’t have to worry about the record. Yet.”
“Don’t be vulgar, Francis. It’s not a game, you know. It’s not basketball.”
“What is it then? All the killing?”
“It’s an Art. It’s the authentic American Folk Art.”
The Tasmanian Devil looked up from the file. “Well, M. Duroc?”
Duroc put his hands on the table. “We would like Jessamyn Bonney dead.”
“That shouldn’t make you happy, but certainly won’t make you lonely.”
Russell said, “Roger, I don’t see where this is leading us. Your people didn’t say anything about…”
Duroc raised his hand. “Silence.” Russell’s jaw dropped. “Thank you. Dr Proctor, we are prepared to offer you more than the deal presented by the United States of America. You have been convicted by no court recognized in Deseret. You could be awarded citizenship.”
Wicking was furious. “This is freakin’ insane.”
“Shush, Francis,” said Dr Proctor. “I’m interested.”
“You could be granted political asylum in Salt Lake City.”
“I’d rather stay here. No, just kidding.”
Gilhooly was confused. The sergeant’s brain wasn’t up to this. Good, that gave Duroc a better than 80% chance of success. The other officer, Bean, was picking his nose and scratching his belly.
“All you have to do is kill one girl. After so many, that shouldn’t be difficult.”
Wicking got up. “I’m ending this meeting now. I had no idea when the President’s office authorized your presence that you would be taking such an extreme stance. Mr Duroc, I shall be reporting in full…”
Duroc pulled the ivory throwing star—invisible to the asylum’s metal detector—and flicked it across the room.
Gilhooly’s throat opened in a cloud of blood. Dr Proctor’s hand was behind him in an instant, catching the falling pistol.
Wicking nearly got his gun out, but not quite.
The shot rang loudly in the room. Wicking took his chair with him as he tumbled backwards.
Duroc was on the other side of the room now, his hand over Bean’s mouth, pinching the guard’s nostrils. He struggled, and died.
“Don’t worry, M. Duroc. Everything in this place is soundproofed. Too many screams in the night.”
Russell was speechless, trembling. Duroc had scooped up Gilhooly’s keys, and was methodically stripping Dr Proctor of his chains.
Gilhooly twitched on the floor, still bleeding. Dr Proctor was free now. He stretched his arms and stamped around. He passed the gun to Duroc, who turned it on Russell. The Treasury man put his hands up.
Dr Proctor knelt by the sergeant, and took hold of the throwing star lodged in his windpipe.
“I told you,” he said, twisting, “not to call me Otto.”
The star scraped bone. Gilhooly gurgled, and stopped kicking. Dr Proctor stood up, and smiled at the Treasury Man.
“Ottokar,” said Russell, “we have a relationship…”
“That’s right, Julian. A very close relationship. None closer.”
The Tasmanian Devil looked around for something. He saw the coffee things, and picked a teaspoon out of the sugarbowl.
“How careless,” he said. “It should have been plastic. I suppose aluminium is cheaper than any petroleum byproduct in these troubled times.”
“Ottokar…”
Dr Proctor stood over Russell, the spoon in one hand, his other on the Treasury man’s shoulder
“Dr Proctor,” said Duroc. “Hurry up. We have a very brief window of opportunity here.”
“It’s a moment’s work, Monsieur.”
Even Duroc didn’t want to watch the Devil at work. By the time the screaming was over, he had Bean stripped of his uniform.
“Is this your size?” he said.
“A little generous over the belly, but we can tighten his belt.”
Dr Proctor stripped out of his whites, and pulled the uniform on. They would have used Gilhooly’s clothes, but there was a little blood on the collar.
“Ready?”
“Yes, Monsieur.” Dr Proctor held up the teaspoon. It was red.
“What are we waiting for?”
“Cook’s privilege,” the Devil said, “I get to lick the spoon.”
VII
“Jesse, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, Hawk. It all seems so crazy, sometimes. The Dreams, the prophecies. I’m a girl from the Denver NoGo, not some picstrip superheroine.”
“You’ve come a long way from the NoGo.”
“Have I? Have I really?”
“You know the answer. What were you? A petty criminal, a sociopath. You’ve killed, you’ve robbed…”
“That was just a phase, you know. You grow out of it.”
“The people you killed won’t grow out of it.”
“I’ve never killed anyone who wouldn’t have killed me.”
“That’s not true.”
“… you’re right.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“… I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like the same girl. With the gangcult, it was different. You just kept riding along with the pack, you did what was expected…”
“You were the leader of the pack.”
“Yes, but that just meant the others expected more of me.”
“Would you go back, if you could?”
“I’d bring back Andrew Jean and Cheeks and the others, yes.”
“That’s not what I asked. Would you ride with the gangcults again? Waiting for the Op or the Maniak who’d take you down?”
“No. I’m too old, anyway. But no.”
“And what else have you got to do?”
“Save the world?”
“Don’t make that sound so bad, Jesse.”
“Isn’t it? This world isn’t all that worth saving, if you ask me.”
“You can’t spend your whole life killing your father.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Your father brought you into this world, and your father was scum, therefore you reject the world.”
“That sounds too easy to me. My father wasn’t the only slimeball in the world. For a start, you should meet my mother, wherever she is. Rancid Robyn.”
“But the world isn’t all slime.”
“Isn’t it? Apart from you, everybody I know is dead. Or ought to be.”
“We will do our parts, and things will be better.”
“I’ve heard that all my life.”
“This time, maybe… Things are different, aren’t they?”
“Different? Yes. I’ve never been a monster before.”
“You’re not a monster. You’re a Spirit Warrior.”
“Jesse Frankenstein’s-Daughter, the Spirit Warrior.”
“You must take the feelings you have for yourself and channel them. You will need all your emotional capacities.”
“It’s starting soon?”
“It’s starting now.”
VIII
Dr Proctor slipped the chip into the auto’s music system, and Fast-Forwarded to the “Nessun dorma!” As the Unknown Prince, Sir Oswald Osbourne, the greatest operatic voice of the ’90s, poured it out. Osbourne apart, the Met’s Turandot was rather minor, he supposed, but you could never tire of the “Nessun dorma!” The aria ended, and he skipped to the finale. “Cera negli occhi tuoi” and “Diecimila anni.” Then, the applause.
The incar computers told him he was in Southern Arizona. He let the machines do all the driving. He had been through this area in ’89, when he was just starting out on his Devil-work. He had liked it because it reminded him o
f the endless mesas and sandy canyons of the Road Runner cartoons. Zoom and Bored (1957), Wild About Hurry (1959), Fastest With the Mostest (1960), Tired and Feathered (1965).
There had been a gangcult then. The Backburners. They had flagged him down to kill him and rob him. He must have added fifteen or twenty to his score that night. He never kept count. That was for the pettifoggers, the lawyers and the journos.
There were seventeen books in print about him, not counting his autobiography, and he’d been in five movies. He preferred Steve Martin’s performance in Tas, the Newman version, to any of the others. Michael Caine had been especially poor in A Devil With Women, and Dustin Hoffman out of his depth in Have Axe, Will Travel. Still, none of them were quite what he saw when he looked in the mirror.
Poor Oliver. He would never get out of the mess he’d been left in. And heads would roll at Sunnydales. More heads, he corrected himself.
Once he had discharged his debt of honour with Seth, he might take the Elder up on the offer of a home in Deseret. But he might prefer to wander the byways of the United States, playing his tricks. He had about a hundred million dollars stashed in accounts, safe deposit boxes and secret caches throughout the country. His face could be changed.
And the Devil would dance again.
Duroc had been able to give him quite precise information regarding the whereabouts of Jessamyn Bonney. His sources must be superb. T-H-R had been after her for years, and according to them she had just dropped out of sight.
But Duroc’s people must be practically inside her skull.
The Monastery of Santa de Nogueira. He had never heard of it, and it wasn’t on most maps, but the Josephites had left directions in the car.
They had also left him with a stimulating array of toys, which he had put to good use already. He was pleased to discover there was a Mid-West Armaments firm called Acme Incorporated, and had tried out their electroknives on a hitch-hiker from Tucson. They were barely serviceable tools, but he kept them for the value of the name.
From a post office in Dos Cabezos, he sent a card to Rex Tendenter and the others on Monsters’ Row. Tracing in the blood of the sheriff, he wrote “HAVING A LOVELY TIME, WISH YOU WERE HERE, LOVE OTTOKAR.” He hoped the Sunnydales people would let the message get through. The monsters deserved a touch of hope. After all, if Dr Ottokar Proctor could get out, then so could they…
Since he reached the world, the media had been crazy. If he’d actually committed all the murders they were trying to pin on him, he ought to get a Nobel prize for inventing teleportation. They had him striking in New York and San Francisco within the same twenty minutes. He was as often reported and as seldom identified as Neil Gaiman. Perhaps, after he had carried out his current commission, he should go after the graphic novelist and collect the Pan-Islamic Congress’ bounty on his head. No, that would demean his Art, importing a touch of too-crass commercialism to the hallowed process of murder.
He had given some thought to the problem of Jessamyn Bonney. He had listened through the Dead Rat tapes several times, and made notes on her capabilities and achievements. He had especially admired her methods in the cases of Susie Terhune and Bronson Manolo. Nothing showy, just a simple display of fatal force. She was no Artist, but she was certainly a competent enough craftswoman.
He read up on Dr Threadneedle, and looked at his autopsy reports. The conclusions were obvious. Jessamyn had something a little extra.
But he had killed people with bio-implants before. Plenty of them. He had sought out the strongest of the strong and left them howling, begging for merciful death.
Jessamyn would be no different.
There was only room for one God of Pain, and Dr Proctor was the ranking applicant for the position.
The moon rose over the desert.
IX
He was alone in the courtyard. It was late. Jesse was sleeping. There was a wind coming across the sands, coming nearer. And in that wind, Hawk knew, was the Devil.
“What the hell…” he said.
Faintly, he heard a voice in the wind, singing…
… singing “Se quel guerrier io fossil… Celeste Aida,” Dr Proctor drove across the sands. Santa de Nogueira was off the road, but the Josephites had given him an auto that converted into a sandcat.
The monastery stood up ahead, silhouetted against the night sky like an Arabian Nights palace. Aida was most apt.
If Duroc’s information was correct, Jessamyn Bonney was in that ancient castle, a princess waiting for her dragon.
Dr Proctor’s smile turned into a grin, and his eyebrows lowered. Those few witnesses left alive who had seen this expression come over his face had testified that he truly did resemble the cartoon character from whom he had taken his nom de homicide.
He chuckled in the back of his throat, his eyeteeth digging into his lips, and relaxed. He was the economist again, the calm pundit of the teevee shows and the press conferences, the smooth liar who had gently pushed the richest, most powerful nation in the world into a monetary cesspool from which it would take centuries to recover.
He looked at himself in the mirror, and twisted his mouth like Daffy Duck. “You know what,” he said to himself, “you’re dethpicable!”
He felt the killing excitement building in his water.
In the Salt Lake City tabernacle, Nguyen Seth picked up his spectacles, and slipped them on. The darkness cleared, and he peered into the pool of blood in the font.
The smoke cleared, and he saw the monastery. Duroc had chosen his catspaw well.
This was a fit night to raise the Devil.
Jesse shifted, disturbed. Faces were coming at her at great speed. The crocodile whispered in her ear, calling ladybug, ladybug. He urged her to fly away home…
… your house is on fire, your children are gone.
Her eye opened in the darkness, and she saw that Hawk-That-Settles had gone from their cell.
Moonlight was flooding in through the windowslit.
In the Outer Darkness, the Ancient Adversary strained towards the wormhole. It was time to be spat out into the physical universe, to join with its Vessel, then seek out its prey…
Dr Proctor turned off the sound system, and concentrated. He found the Devil inside himself, and summoned the creature up. His friends on Monsters’ Row would be proud of him.
Hawk-That-Settles sang at the moon, a song his father had taught him. He called for the crocodile. He fancied that the yellow circle in the sky was distending, becoming an oval, disgorging a snout, sprouting a lashing tail. His song continued, and the spirits of his ancestors joined him.
Duroc awoke, and reached for the knife under his pillow. He had been dreaming of his uncle, of Dien Bien Phu, again. The woman beside him sat up, grumbling, and stroked his back.
“Roger, you’re soaking.”
His heart calmed. He put the blade back. “It is nothing, Sister Harrison,” he said, “get back to sleep.”
“You’re feverish.”
“No, it’s just… a family matter.”
In the Sea of Tranquillity, the dome of Camp Pournelle reflected the sun’s rays, visible to the naked eye on earth as a twinkle in the face of the man in the moon.
Abandoned for ten years, since the discontinuance of the United States space program, the camp was home only to anonymous ranks of calculating machines.
A change in the temperature of the lunar subsoil triggered a mechanism, and a printer began to process a strip for the eyes of a staff long gone earthside for desk jobs.
Sensors swivelled. Events took place. They were noted down, filed away, and forgotten…
On the Reservation, Two-Dogs-Dying was racked with another coughing fit. He was four-fifths of the way through a pint of Old Thunderblast, an especially subtle vintage manufactured as a side-effect during the processing of cattle-feed and sold off for fifty cents a bottle to the less discerning citizens of the South-West.
Two-Dogs was lying on a garbage dump, surrounded by refuse for which even th
e scavenger dogs of the Navaho had no use. Next to his head was the screen of an obsolete personal computer, cracked diagonally.
In the glass, he saw the moon broken in half like a plate. It shifted, and he knew his vision was going again. He drained the bottle, and tossed it away. It broke. Soon, he would be vomiting. That was the way it always was these days. Drink, then puke. He had been badly named at birth, and now he was fulfilling his father’s poor choice.
The moon twisted.
Suddenly, he was sober. He turned onto his back, and looked up at the grinning face in the sky.
He opened his mouth, and felt an explosion coming up from his stomach. He took a deep breath, and joined voice with his son, three hundred miles to the south, singing the song of the moon, the song of their family…
The moon crocodile grinned.
Nguyen Seth clung to the shaking font as the Tabernacle shook. It was a small earthquake. The blood splashed his face.
He remembered Bruno Bonney, saw him through his daughter’s eyes as her nails went into his throat.
The Dark Ones swarmed in the beyond, great wings flapping, tentacles uncoiling…
Fort Apache, Lake Havasu. Trooper Stack realized Leona was awake. He rolled over to kiss her, and saw tears on her face.
“Nathan,” she said, “it’s over. Us, I mean.”
Dr Proctor braked, and got out of the car. There was a voice in the night, howling. He opened the trunk, and distributed weapons about his person.
It wasn’t Jessamyn screaming. It must be the Indian, Hawk-That-Settles. He had glanced over his stats, and discounted him. He was negligible.
He walked up the gentle incline towards the gate of Santa de Nogueira.
“Holiness, Holiness…”
On the other side of the world, Father Declan O’Shaughnessy approached Pope Georgi I in one of the inner chambers of the Vatican. The Holy Father was studying reports from Jesuit agents in Central America.
“What is it, Declan?”
“A disturbance. A big one. Our espers are speaking in tongues, and frothing at the mouth.”