An Affair of Sorcerers

by George C. Chesbro

  I tried to fight off the oppressive loneliness by finely focusing my thoughts. For a while I concentrated on April, but that was too painful and only made matters worse. I shifted my concentration to Esobus and the coven, mulling over everything that had happened, everyone I’d talked to, all I knew or could reasonably conjecture: Daniel’s behavior, Marlowe’s immolation, Kathy’s poisoning—I kept it all rolling, in living color, on an endless loop in my mind.

  It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that Smathers and Kee had been carrying out experiments in sensory deprivation at the university from Day One. They’d probably been scooping Bowery derelicts up off the sidewalk to use as subjects, then putting them back—or burying them—when the experiments were finished. The money for the equipment had come from their piece of the coven action in milking wealthy victims like Bobby Weiss.

  Also, I was now positive that the rabid bat had come from Smathers. The Nobel Prize winner had unlimited access to the research facilities of the university’s medical school, and that was undoubtedly where he’d scrounged up the diseased animal. Ironically, his reason at the time had probably been personal, completely divorced from the Esobus investigation. The bat had been Smather’s offbeat revenge on me for investigating him.

  Every so often I tried to move. Perhaps because I finally had a fix on the nature of what was being done to me, I imagined I could occasionally feel an arm or leg move, my chest expand and contract. Once I even felt pain in my thumb, and I’d never experienced a more welcome sensation. But then it disappeared, which seemed to confirm that they were using curare in the intravenous solutions they had to be feeding me.

  Waiting.

  It went on and on, the terrible, crushing silence filled with my personal demons. Despite my acceptance of my death and my desperate efforts to focus my thoughts, the impact of the sensory deprivation was devastating. Knowledge of my situation was at once my greatest torment and my only defense; but it wasn’t enough of a defense. The total lack of stimulation was tearing away the scabs on my psyche, releasing every pustule of fear and frustration I’d ever known, bringing it all up in one lump to sore and fester in my conscious mind; soon a flash point would be reached.

  With increasing frequency, I found myself waking from periods of unconsciousness to find myself slipping down into the black hole. I fought back, but I was getting progressively weaker. Soon, I knew, I would fall down there and not be able to climb out. I’d be a zombie, a slave to Esobus, willing to do anything that was asked of me.

  Until the rabies killed me.

  The next time I emerged from semiconsciousness, I discovered that the black hole was far in the distance, and I felt on fairly solid mental ground. It took me a few seconds to realize what had brought me back.

  My left foot was resting against something solid. I could feel it, and it was as if this delicate sense of touch were the greatest gift I’d ever received.

  Slowly, tentatively, I sent a message from my brain down to my left leg, very politely asking it to move. It did. My toes wiggled, and my foot slid back and forth, touching the smooth, slightly slimy side and bottom of the tank. I tried the other leg. It too moved, as did my arms.

  I was floating free.

  I twisted around and felt my knees bang against the slate bottom. I stood, reached up with my hand and felt my fingers curl around a steel edge. I gave a mental whoop, pushed off the bottom and pulled with my arms. Buoyed by the salt water, I soared like a slightly dopey flying fish over the side of the tank. Needles tore from my flesh, and I landed hard on my back on a bare, hardwood floor. That stunned me for a moment, but nothing had broken. I ripped the rubber mask off my head. The light from the fluorescent lights in the laboratory slashed into my eyes like razor blades. I screwed my eyes shut and took deep, shuddering breaths. My skin was a kaleidoscope of sensation, as if every nerve fiber in my naked body were thirstily drinking up the feel of the water and the cold wood. My sensory floodgates were open, and living was gushing through them.

  They hadn’t killed me yet.

  I tried to rise, but couldn’t. My legs felt like warm putty. After spending an unknown length of time in the water, I knew it was going to be some time before everything worked properly.

  I propped myself up on one elbow and opened my eyes to slits. The light still hurt, but the pain was tolerable. I was surrounded by a tangle of wires and plastic feeding tubes. A metal stand from which the intravenous feeding bags had hung was directly to my left. A huge electronic monitoring machine a few feet off to the right blinked merrily, as if welcoming me back to the world of light and the living.

  When I moved my head, I found something else watching me. My flop on the floor and the tearing out of the feeding tubes must have tripped some warning device; Kee’s Chinese assistant had appeared, and he was holding a large .38 in his hand. The sight was just what I needed to cheer me up.

  The Chinese advanced toward me. I rolled over on my back, closed my eyes and moaned. When I felt him standing over me, I opened my eyes, grabbed the metal stand and pulled it toward him. The Chinese ducked, instinctively raising his gun hand to ward off the steel bar. The .38 went off, and a bullet shattered the glass tank above me. Several thousand gallons of water cascaded over us, knocking the Chinese off his feet and sloshing me across the room to come up hard and painfully against the monitoring machine. I sputtered and coughed water. My vision cleared in time for me to see the dazed Chinese get up on his knees and retch; fortunately, he’d swallowed more water than I had. The gun had fallen out of his hand and was about twenty feet to his right, near what looked like the main power switch for the floor. I began crawling toward the weapon on my hands and knees.

  I’d just got started when the rest of the entourage arrived. Smathers and Kee, probably alerted by the sound of the gunshot, rushed in through the door on the opposite side of the room.

  Things didn’t seem to be going too well for me.

  Seized by terror, and not a little self-pity at the injustice of it all, I felt my heart hammering inside my chest, paralyzing me; all I could do was stay kneeling and stare at the two scientists.

  Kee was wearing a plaid work shirt, shiny chinos a size too small for him, and green, high-top sneakers. But he didn’t look funny to me. His eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses were great dark pools of oil set in flesh that might have been made of fine yellow porcelain. He made a hissing sound behind his teeth.

  Smathers’ emerald-green eyes were filled with hate. He swore in frustration, then barked orders. The assistant quickly rose to his feet, spotted the gun and started to walk toward it.

  The realization that I was about to be shot—or dumped back into the tank—proved remarkably therapeutic. It seemed a good time to do something; like turn around, scramble back the way I’d come, climb up on top of the monitoring machine and pull some wires.

  The machine whirred and popped, sending up clouds of black, acrid smoke. The live wires in my hands sputtered like deadly Fourth of July sparklers. I figured it was time for something to start going my way; I spun a mental prayer wheel, something concerning proper insulation in the machine I was squatting on, then tossed the wires into the water on the floor.

  Kee had excellent reflexes. He leaped at the same time I dropped the wires and managed to land on a dry, warped, upward-sloping spot against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Smathers and the assistant weren’t so lucky—or fast. They both tried walking on water, but didn’t get far. Their screams were burned out of their throats by a few hundred thousand volts of electricity. Already dead, they danced around for a few seconds, then fell; their bodies gradually stopped twitching as the electricity locked their joints and muscles. There was a smell in the air like that of fried pork rinds.

  The gun was still in the middle of the floor, surrounded by the electricity-filled water. That was just fine with me, because Kee was having troubles of his own: the water was gradually working its way up the increasingly narrow shores of his island of dr
y wood. Kee was backed up against the wall, his arms splayed out to either side of him, his fingers clawing at the plaster. Rabies or no, dunking or no, at the moment I felt—good. I sat down, crossed my legs and smiled at him.

  “Tough batshit,” I said easily. “Win a few, lose a few.”

  For the first time, Kee’s eyes reflected real emotion. There was fear of the liquid death seeping toward him, and there was hate. A lot of hate. I shouldn’t have goaded him; it had been too inspirational.

  The main power switch was a good fifteen feet away, but I’d already seen the strength he had in his legs. Kee gave a tremendous yell, then leaped straight up in the air; he planted his feet against the wall and dived for the power switch.

  I knew he was going to make it, and he was closer to the gun than I was. Kee’s fingertips hit the control switch, plunging the floor into darkness. His body hit the water a split second later, and I jumped to the floor. Waddling like a drunken duck on legs that felt as if they belonged to a toddler, pumping my arms for momentum, I staggered down the corridor toward the stairs. I could hear Kee splashing furiously along behind me, and there was no doubt in my mind that he’d remembered to pick up the gun. I caromed off the wall at the end of the corridor, fell down the stairs and hit the steel door at the bottom. Naturally, the door was locked.

  There wasn’t going to be any naked dwarf running through the hallowed corridors of Marten Hall.

  I spun and crouched in the darkness, trying to make myself as small a target as possible. With two bodies in the laboratory to explain or somehow get rid of, I expected Kee would no longer be concerned with making me a servant of Esobus; he’d want to dispose of me as quickly as possible. It was going to be like shooting a dwarf in a barrel.

  I held my breath and waited for the crash of the gun. All I heard was a dull click; the water had fouled the gun’s firing mechanism. I waited.

  I could hear Kee slowly and cautiously descending the stairs. I’d taught him some respect, but that wasn’t going to be enough. Even if I hadn’t spent an unknown number of hours underwater, semi-paralyzed by drugs, I’d probably have been no match for the powerful Kee I’d watched flit across the floor and walls of the laboratory like Superman. On the other hand, I couldn’t just sit still and wait for him to beat my brains out.

  After waiting a few seconds for him to descend further, I lunged up and forward, sweeping my hand through the general area where I hoped his legs would be. I got lucky. I caught his ankle and yanked. Kee yelped with surprise and went backward, landing on his back on the stairs.

  There was no way of getting by him. I was very weak, and I assumed Kee was a karate expert. He’d probably break every bone in my body by the time I got halfway past him. But I had an angle on his midsection, and I drove my fist into his groin. That took the power out of a kick that could have killed me; his heel bounced painfully off my rib cage, but did no damage.

  Kee was doubled over with pain, his shape just barely visible in the darkness. I could get past him now, but that would just mean playing cat-and-mouse up in the darkness of the laboratory; that was a game I eventually had to lose. I had no choice but to attack.

  Grimacing against my own pain, I moved up and clapped my hands over Kee’s ears. He screamed and half-rose. That was the position I wanted him in; he was off balance, his concentration shattered. I grabbed hold of both his ears and dropped. Kee flew over me and plummeted down into the darkness. He came up hard against the steel door, and there was a single, sharp cracking sound. I didn’t have to go down and feel his pulse to know that Kee was dead, his neck broken.

  I tasted blood, and I was very dizzy. I slumped down on a step, braced myself against the wall and waited for my head to clear. Eventually I would go back upstairs, find a phone and call Garth. At the moment I was thinking of something else. The fact that I was still alive was nothing short of miraculous; I should have felt elation, but I didn’t. I felt hollowed out. Now that the danger was past, I felt strangely split, not caring about anything at all; I felt a stranger to myself.

  I told myself it was just the aftermath of terror, the effects of shock and exhaustion. I was sure the strange feeling of emptiness would pass.

  Chapter 18

  It didn’t.

  It had taken me only a few hours to realize that the long submersion in the tank had resulted in much more than a temporarily wrinkled and squeaky-clean dwarf. Smathers and Kee had gutted me, scraped me out, using my own mind against me as a razor-sharp scalpel. I’d lost something in the tank. I wasn’t sure what it was I’d lost, which meant I wasn’t sure how to find it. I’d sensed the beginning of a psychotic episode; I felt as if I were a bag of skin loosely inflated by a few weak, random thoughts.

  I’d decided that I needed at least a mini-vacation before the bag of skin deflated and I spent the last years of my life in a psychiatric ward at Rockland State. Still unwilling to leave New York with so many questions remaining, I’d packed a bag and moved into the Waldorf. It was a move I’d made before when I felt the need to decompress; I enjoyed the luxury. Also, I’d solved a difficult case for the manager some years before, and there was always a suite waiting for me, at a large discount. But the move had been a mistake; the newly decorated rooms reminded me of a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor. A phone call to the desk would have gotten me another room, but I couldn’t manage the call. I couldn’t manage anything. Moving into the hotel was the last purposeful action I’d taken.

  Someone was knocking on the door. It had to be a mistake, since no one other than Garth, Joshua and the hotel staff knew where I was. Garth or Joshua would have called first. Room Service, which, at Garth’s insistence, had been leaving sandwiches and milk at regular intervals outside my door, rapped only once.

  I ignored the persistent knocking and stayed in my chair before the window, staring out over the city. I would pick out a car coming up Park Avenue below me, follow it with my eyes until it was out of sight, then pick up another car and repeat the process. That was what I’d been doing with my days. When I felt tired, I slept; when Joshua showed up to give me an injection, I let him in; if I felt hungry, I’d open the door to get whatever Room Service had left me. The rest of the time I sat and stared.

  Garth had responded to my call four days before. He and Johnny Barnard had broken down the laboratory door, wrapped me up in a blanket and taken me to the university Medical Center, where I learned that I’d been in Smathers’ sensory-deprivation tank for about three and a half days; it had felt like years.

  Apparently, there’d been more of a safety cushion built into the series of rabies shots I’d already been given than Joshua had led me to believe; he’d simply given me an extra-large dose to make up for the shots I’d missed, then told me I’d be all right as long as I rested and got the remaining shots. The wound on my thumb had healed to the point where the immersion in the water hadn’t done any lasting damage. I was told that there was nothing wrong with me physically, and that I could go home after Garth had taken my deposition. Later, I’d checked into the Waldorf.

  The next morning, a Wednesday, I’d tried to get up to go to the Medical Center for my shot; I couldn’t. It had taken me almost two hours to care enough to call Greene and ask him to come over. A bag of skin has no desire, no fear, no will. I’d intended to brush my teeth, bathe, put on clean clothes, go out into the sunshine. Now it was Friday, and I still just couldn’t seem to get around to any of those things. The PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign still hung on the knob outside.

  I picked out another car, followed it up the avenue. It was some time before I realized that the person on the other side of the door was shouting.

  “Robert! It’s April! I know you’re in there, and I’m not going away until you open the door!”

  April Marlowe was the last person in the world I wanted to have see me. Indeed, just the sound of her voice induced my most violent reaction in four days; I jack-knifed forward in the chair and clapped my hands over my ears.

  “Robert! T
here are a lot of people out here in the hall, and they’re staring at me! Please! It’s terribly embarrassing, but I’m not going away until I see you!”

  Finally I rose and went to the door. I opened it, then quickly stepped back into the dim light of the room. In that instant I’d seen that April was telling the truth: at least a dozen people had been standing around in the hall, watching her pound on the strange dwarf’s door. It made me feel even sicker.

  April stepped into the room, and I quickly closed the door behind her. Dressed in a white jumper embroidered with red and green flowers, worn over a pale blue sweater, she seemed in that moment the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. The light scent she was wearing drifted into my nostrils. I dropped my eyes and turned away in shame: I knew what I looked and smelled like.

  “Robert? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Hard … to talk,” I mumbled. It was as if each word had to be carefully searched out inside my head, practiced, then forced through my mouth.

  “Robert …?”

  She started toward me, and I cringed. She stopped and stared at me intently. “Don’t … don’t want … to talk.”

  “Okay,” April said softly, after a pause. “Let’s just sit down and be together.”

  I shook my head. The movement brought tears to my eyes; they rolled freely down my cheeks, dripped from my chin to the floor. “Please … go away.”

  “Nope,” she said easily. There was the slightest trace of laughter in her voice. “If you want me to go, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to throw me out. Judging from the way you look, I think I can handle you.”

  “Garth … tell you I … was here?”