by Mark Jeffrey
You must do what only you can do.
Another world beneath this one, beneath this one, beneath this one …
Like Russian dolls, he supposed. Worlds inside worlds inside worlds.
“Do you know what the Bondsman fears the most?”
Max shook his head.
“A mind that refuses to succumb. A singularly strong mind. Once that can bend the Dreamtime, despite the beliefs of a billion other minds. One person who is a counterweight to all of that. Passion can do this, as well as unshakable belief.
“But then there are people like you, Max, people who are born to do it. People to whom this comes as naturally as breathing.”
Max nodded. His secret. He had been bred by the Archons for this exact talent.
An Imaginal.
“And that is why I wish to give you a gift. A gift of knowledge. Answers to all of your questions. A gift that will take advantage of your raw talents. A gift only for you, Max Quick.”
Stevie pulled a ratty envelope from his tattered rags. He held it out to Max.
Run!
DangerDangerDanger!
The warning came from a book in the bookstore, across the street. The book was talking to him.
Wait, what? The book was talking to him?
And it was pulsing insistently, faster now than even before. Throbbing golden light positively jibbered at him.
“You want to know who the Bondsman is. You must have his True Name. The answer is in this envelope.”
“Wait. You know who the Bondsman is?” Max whispered.
“Yes,” Stevie replied.
“You’re sure? You’re absolutely, positively certain?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re offering this knowledge to me.”
“Yes. Everything you want to know is here in this envelope.”
“Why don’t you just tell me? Why do I have to read it?”
Stevie sighed. “The Bondsman’s True Name is protected by extraordinary counter-measures. Telling you outright would not work. Nor would explaining to you why it would not work. Some things are beyond the power of words to express. The only way I can convey the certain knowledge of who the Bondsman is to you is through this envelope. Take it. Open it. All your answers lay within.”
RUNrunRUNrunRUNrunRUN!
The bookstore book pulsed in new patterns, telegraphing panic like a pixie on fire. It was like it was trying all psychic frequencies it could think of to get a message through.
Max was extraordinarily tempted to take the envelope from Stevie James. And some part of his brain, he realized then, was moving too slowly. Time was all slippy-slidey. Max’s reaction time was off. He was being very sloppy, and he knew it. He was missing dangers.
He should have recognized before now, just this very moment, that whatever was in this envelope was probably a Page from a Book — something inscribed with the fiery Words or runes of the Dreamtime that could render cryptomnesia as well entrap him in false realities and simulacra.
And that book in the bookstore yelling at him was probably a Book.
It was like the book — or Book — in the bookstore was beaming a pirate radio signal directly into his head. It was working to disrupt the geas or enchantment that had been put upon him by Stevie James. Bursts of intelligible speech from the Book could be made out between the bursts of static emanating from Stevie James in his newly heightened senses.
But the Book in the bookstore was finally winning. It was breaking through and reaching him, more loudly and clearly than Stevie James.
Get out of here! Run! Run to me! The Book said.
What was he doing? My God, this Stevie James person had identified him as Max Quick in the world of The Bondsman! He was in horrific danger now — and there was no telling what was in this envelope that had just been handed to him …
Before another neuron-zap, Max whooshed.
He zipped into the bookstore. He grabbed the talking Book and whooshed into the very back and hid himself.
He could still see Stevie James from where he sat. Stevie hadn’t moved a muscle — except for lowering the arm that had been holding the envelope out.
Now, he whispered into the mountain wind in a way that Max’s enhanced senses could pick up but no one else would.
Stevie said, “Ah — I’ve frightened you, made you suspicious. That’s understandable. I apologize for that. Come back when you’re ready — the gift of the Bondsman’s identity will be waiting for you. And so will I.”
With that, Stevie James stood. His head contorted and he opened his mouth wide, raising a hand to it with a ring that Max has not noticed before. An odd gargling sound came of him for several moments.
Then he left the bench. Max watched him walk through the night mist until he …
Morning.
Suddenly and without transition, it was morning. Of the next day?
The bookstore was open. Patrons were milling about; the sales counter was staffed.
Max blinked as he sat on the floor. No one had seemed to notice him, though that was certainly odd. He must have been incapacitated for the entire night.
He walked up to the front counter and checked the date on the newspaper: it was a week later. He’d been out on that bench in Raffle’s Pass with Stevie James for an entire week.
And it had seemed like only moments to him.
And this with Fell Simon on his tail! What was that Romani had said? He was only a day behind … ? Well somehow Fell Simon had passed him by, missed him. This at least was a stroke of good luck.
But everything else was extraordinary. Deeply frightening.
At that moment, Max realized: he had not heard a single lie from Stevie James. Every single thing he had said been the absolute truth. His new senses would have detected a lie.
Max reflected for a moment: was it possible Stevie James was able to cloak a lie from him somehow? Overpower his senses, his ability to hear the truth?
The answer came to him like a slam to the skull: No.
It wasn’t.
Max knew it at the deepest level of his awareness. Truth was truth in the core of the universe itself. Once you could see it, you could not be made blind to it again. Or at least, he corrected himself: you would realize your truth-blindness, once you had been able to See.
How he knew this he couldn’t say, except that he knew it in the same way he knew cold felt cold and hot felt hot: he’d experienced it, knew what those things were and as a result he knew its characteristics with a certainty.
So Stevie James had been telling the truth!
He had offered the true identity of the Bondsman — the very thing that Max was looking for. And Max had turned him down.
He looked down. The Book in his hands with the golden glow was the reason why he had refused. But Max did not open it — he knew the dangers of Books. Instead he stared at the cover briefly. It read:
THE DIARY OF MADAME EUROPA ROMANI
He placed the Book back on the shelf.
He’d read another diary like this once: that of Hess and Romey Bloom, though that was not so infused with numinous properties as was this tome. Nevertheless, he had no desire to open it, to actually read its contents. It had warded him from evil and that was enough.
He did not understand why Romani had sent him here, nor whom Stevie James truly served.
But somehow, he had escaped the clutches of Fell Simon, and perhaps that was explanation enough.
And Romani’s diary, or some echo of her contained within it, had protected him.
FOR A TIME after Raffle’s Pass, Max lived a vagabond life, as he had done for much of his existence. He was alone again in the world — again. But this did not bother him. He had done this on many occasions before. He knew how to live off scraps or even small game in the woods, hunting with only a sharpened stick. He walked and hitched rides — usually undetected, in the back of a flatbed covered by a tarp.
Three times, in his travels, he heard the song Modern Lament.
Once it was being sung and played on an acoustic guitar by a homeless man, begging for money at a gas station. The second time, it was a full-on production of the song. It came from the stereo of a house he slept in the back of — but Max couldn’t tell whether it was coming from a radio or if it was a recording.
And the third time, as he walked along a street in a small village, a woman sang it to herself as she passed him by.
This was odd, of course. He knew the song had been written by Planet Furious back at Camp Griswold. And it had never been written down or performed in public. So how did all these people know the tune?
Vaguely, he worried that he would run into Jane Willow again. He kept his eyes open everywhere he went, dreading a chance encounter. He didn’t know how to defend himself from one of her attacks. And he wanted to find Ian and Sasha and Casey and even Enki again.
But he did not know where to look.
He avoided human contact when he could. He did not want anyone to see his face. Always, his hoodie was up around his cheeks. He had pinched a set of goggles (which he wore frequently) and binoculars and a few other items. He employed all of these judiciously as he moved from place to place, town to town.
And sometimes he whooshed along the freeway, not caring what motorists might make of the strange blur that went flying past them. Always he kept an eye out for Sky Chambers, however. He knew that a whoosh-blur spotted from the air would be an altogether different matter: Fell Simon would be watching for him.
Somewhere along his travels, at a gas station, he overheard Elites — Veerspikes at that — discussing an upcoming Bondsman Rally, and something inside him clicked. Yes. That was where he needed to go.
He would see this Bondsman up close, in person.
If it should turn out that the Bondsman truly was himself, or Johnny Siren, or a myriad other people he could recognize, in his immediate presence, Max would know instantly. His new senses were that raw, that open. But he had to be proximate in real life; an image on television would not do.
He slipped inside the Veerspike’s black car, picking the lock with ease. There was a flier on the seat describing the time and location of the Rally was a map. Yes. This was it.
With new purpose in his stride, Max Quick aimed his steps west towards the setting sun — and towards the Bondsman himself.
Eleven: Doctor Bogenbroom
ENKI, SASHA, IAN and Casey stood warily outside the back of the estate, cloaked in the void night of a new moon.
A brook giggled over rocks nearby. It splashed down out of the estate and then under the Gate into the woods beyond, where the homeless and hungry drank and washed and soiled in its ever-dirtying shores.
Such wealth, so close to such squalor, Casey thought.
“Behold the hallowed home of one Doctor Bogenbroom,” Enki announced.
“And this is the guy that touched the coin,” Casey said. “The guy who knows who the Bondsman is.”
Enki nodded.
“So what’s the plan?” Sasha asked Enki. “Are we just going to knock on the front door and say, Trick or Treat?”
“If we are, I’ve got the perfect idea for a mask,” Ian said with a grin. Casey snorted a laugh.
“Frontal assault,” Enki replied, to everyone’s surprise. “Sasha. Casey. Take these, you’ll need them.” He reached into the same Book he had had with him back on the beach and handed each of them a length of rope and a flashlight. “And your guns. Ready them.” They did so, and Enki whispered something as he touched the muzzles of the ensorceled firearms. “There. Your weapons are now unheard, silent. But they will still be visible; there will still be a burst of fire, so you must have a care not to be seen.”
“Seen?” Casey asked. “Seen by who?”
“Them,” Enki said, nodding at the house. “There will be guards, of course. No telling how many. They are your department. Or why else do you think Logan White-Cloud trained you?”
“I’m coming with —“ Ian started. But Enki cut him off:
“No. I need you to carry me up to the house un-perforated,” Enki said. “Your bloodmetal coverings should do the trick.”
“As long as I’m facing the house, yeah.” Ian said.
“Well. Then let us be sure you face the house,” Enki replied, irritably.
“No, I meant: what if someone sneaks up behind us?”
“Oh. Well. Sasha or Casey will have to take care of them.”
Casey looked her guns, and then pointedly at Enki. “You know, you still haven’t told us where you got these.”
Enki winced and his eyes wailed with drowned secrets. But he simply said, “Now is not the time or place. Come.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, IAN, clad in his impish black iron, ran swiftly, carrying Enki on his back from a distant corner of the long greenswards and gardens that made up the approach to lavish estate. Deep shadows cast by milky starlight moved like two dimensional specters in the rustling wind. The tops of the razor-crisp sculpted bushes waved like flickering flames in the high winds.
Sasha and Casey, Ian knew, approached from another direction. Even with the enhanced vision the bloodmetal suit gave him, Ian could not see the girls anywhere. That was good, he thought, but then recalled: the suit had not recently drunk the blood of enemies — its powers were weak. As if it heard his thought, the barbed wire tendrils that wrapped around inside the suit bit down on Ian’s own veins like a succubus.
If it could not drink of enemies, it would drink from him.
That was the price of bloodmetal. It would drain him to death if necessary, Ian knew. The thing that swaddled him had no mind: it was pure id, it was hunger, and that was all.
Far away, across the manicured lawns, Casey and Sasha ran towards the great house. The terrain was perfectly flat, but there were many bushes along the way that they hugged to conceal their approach. Heads whipping this way and that, they were mildly surprised to encounter no one patrolling the wide lawns. It seemed foolish, careless, to leave so much terrain undefended.
Logan White-Cloud would not have approved.
Sasha studied Casey with growing unease: she was missing details, Sasha noted. “Hey,” Sasha shout-whispered.
“What?” Casey spun, alarmed.
“You,” Sasha replied. “You’re what.” Casey frowned. “Your head’s not in the game. Stop thinking about him.”
Casey scowled. “Wrong him,” she replied. “It’s not Cody. It’s Max.”
Sasha raised an eyebrow.
“He’s not well in the head,” Casey explained, stopping briefly. “All that stuff back at the Shell … he’s losing his mind. Or he lost it way back when, and now he’s re-merged with some personality that lost it long ago. I don’t trust him.”
“Well, now’s a helluva time to revisit that,” Sasha admonished.
Casey nodded sheepishly. “I know. Okay. Okay. I’m back in the game now.”
They had neared the front of the house where two — and only two, Sasha noted — guards walked back and forth, back and forth, clearly bored.
“This is too easy,” Casey whispered, and then stepped out from the shadows. “Hey. Idiot brothers.” The two guards were slow on their feet, never expecting to be surprised on their own turf — especially so far from the gate. “Yeah. You.” Casey confirmed. They both clumsily reached for their pistols. Casey could almost see their brains going, Oh! We’re supposed to do something if this happens, right? What is that? Oh yes — yes I know! It’s this!
Casey fired two silent shots, bullets grazing the sides of both of their heads. She was bored. These two were not going to provide the amusement she had anticipated: she was itching for a fight. They were just nobodies. The fear glistening in their eyes made both Sasha and Casey almost feel sorry for them.
“Drop your weapons,” Sasha shouted, nearly yawning. “And we won’t kill you.”
They both did so immediately, to Casey’s chagrin. Sasha motioned for them to come closer. They did so, and Casey tied them up.
Within moments, Ian and Enki arrived. “That’s it,” Casey said. “I don’t think there are any more of them.”
Enki’s eyes drifted up to the third floor of the mansion, where a single light shone out across the long yard.
“Alright then. Time to meet the good Doctor Bogenbroom.”
INSIDE THE MANSION, they crept quietly inside the first floor.
The foursome entered via the kitchen, which was huge, dark and empty. It looked like no one had cooked here in decades. Dust caked everything.
Next, Casey swept her flashlight into the adjoining room, pointing it from atop the Red Roses like she had seen cops do on television. She was startled to find that it was filled with people laying down on beds. At first, she thought it might be a morgue — but she quickly saw that she was in a medical bay.
Why were the lights out in here?
There were nearly twenty people, all hooked up to medical machines of various kinds. All were unconscious. Their pulses made silent little LED lights on displays next to them. IV drip-bags hung from portable wheelers, feeding tubes stuck into each patient’s arm.
“Strange,” Ian whispered. “This is like a hospital … but not of them actually seems hurt.”
“Hey … you’re right,” Sasha said, admiring Ian. She had not noticed that.
Enki placed his hand on one patient’s heart. “Alive,” he confirmed. Unceremoniously — and with rotten bedside manner for a physician — he thumbed open one eyelid. “Comatose, though.” He checked the tongue and said, “Meridians are all out of whack. They’ve been comatose for some time. Possibly … possibly years.” he concluded. Then he picked up one slack arm — and Casey saw that small needles riddled it.
“Acupuncture?” Casey asked.
“It’s opposite,” Enki growled. “Antipuncture. These needles are strategically placed to disrupt the flow of Chi. I believe that is what is keeping them all under.”