“Daddy, I’m scared,” Ezra said.
“Me too,” Dad said. The coffin lowered, then the dirt.
Conrad was scared also, but he couldn’t speak. His mouth was full of blood.
“Please look at these cards. What do you see? Quickly.”
Thumb whorls. Faces. Hell. A light bulb attended by flies. “Daddy?”
“Oh, you’ve been practicing the meditations. The Occultus Tyrranis suffers from mistranslation. It is often a bald forgery and to follow the instructions of such a tract leads to abiding misery and most gruesome consequences. Your copy is not a forgery, but you will dwell in abiding misery all the same, I think.”
“Hold his head, amigos. This will turn our friend inside out.”
The injection was delivered by an eighteen gauge needle, the kind of needle vets stick in horses, and it slid directly into Conrad’s spine.
“Hold still, my friend,” the Brazilian said. “This is going to hurt.”
It hurt.
Funny thing how most of them didn’t possess names. The Brazilian; the Slovakian; the Russian. Conrad was the American now that the former American was pushing daisies.
“Time is a ring, the muscle that moves the eye. Time is the sun, a ring, a mouth, a white howl in a black mouth. Time feeds on itself.”
Faces, opened. Flowers, flies. A light bulb spat and went dark. Its filament glowed like tines of the Devil’s trident.
The elk-horned man laughed and laughed through an unhinged jaw. His face was milk. He loomed above the fig trees, slapped aside their wooly branches as he came cackling. And his phallus was a medieval pike striking sparks.
“The whole shebang is utterly theoretical,” Mom said as she notched up the engine full throttle. “Go Mariners!” Her canvas-topped Supercub slowly nosed into the cliffs, folded itself to an orange ball of confetti.
Bang. The universe collapsed into a particle.
“Time runs in all directions. Time is a droplet of blood crashing into a linoleum tile. Time is a nosebleed.”
“So, Conrad. I must warn you that there are certain risks associated with this procedure. Basically, a sequence of chemical alterations will occur. A fundamental reordering of your essential components. Also, conceivably, worms could eat your brain. Shall we proceed, yes?”
“If you’re screaming, you’re alive.”
Conrad was screaming. The crowd was screaming.
The Slovakian with the devil tattoos, the replica Bronze Age helmet with spikes and horns and the replica Bronze Age bow, shot him in the leg with a barbed arrow. Felt as if a Clydesdale had kicked him in the quivering meat six inches north of the knee. The crowd loved it. Its thunder buried him and the chariot came on, a chrome-plated pile driver astride a golden cloud of dust. Cameras whirred and popped.
“They say God dwells outside of Time. He wants to eat us because He is love.”
That horsefucker of a needle rammed into his spine and kept going. It squirted a pure grade-A Cenozoic microbe comet into his blood, and tick, tick, tick.
Supernova. Light bulbs everywhere snuffed as one.
“Please examine the cards. You will be allotted five seconds for each card. Tell me what you see.”
Why were the cards covered in bloody fingerprints? Why did they make him so sick in his stomach? Sinking into the deep, deep black.
“I see. I see. Moths. Holes in the faces.”
“Time feeds itself. Time is a muscle, a mouth. Opening.”
“Stop looking at the cards. Stop.”
“But I can’t stop.”
Every shaking shudder of every hollow-eyed mountain; every slosh and slip of every bottomless cup of sea. Dust and grit filtered down from cracks, unshuttered skylights that looked into abysses.
The universe is colder than Absolute Night, yet is exploding like the blood droplet in its impact. It has begun to bubble.
Siamese twins shook hands and boarded separate cabs.
The Slovakian got a final howl as Conrad’s spear tore him from the chariot and pinned him to the blotted Coliseum sand, before the angry hyenas ate his hands, his feet, before they yanked his manhood into saltwater taffy and the crowd repaired to the bars for cocktails and appetizers, to pay its debts and celebrate with drugs, sex and rock music. Thumbs down.
“Please look into the light. Look only at the light. Now, I am going to say a word. When I say this word, the world as you know it will cease to exist. It will become something new. Are you prepared to become a superhuman, my boy?”
The cathode dilated and spewed ichor of the gods into his veins.
“Listen carefully.”
Interlude
Funny story about the first time Conrad met Marsh and Singh.
The trio collided in Mexico shortly after Imogene originally went missing along with her lover, the esteemed Dr. Raul Lorca. Conrad flew from the Aegean when he received a late night message that she was in deep trouble and needed him to get his ass to Mexico. Genie couldn’t talk, someone watched her every move. Come quick, bro. I’m in it now. The line went dead before she gave him her exact location.
He was a mess. The contest had been a team event, a gory recreation of some epic Peloponnesian slaughter. It got ugly, as the big-draw battle royales inevitably did—and he was one of the fortunate few to crawl away with all his original parts. He’d been stabbed and slashed, punctured with an arrow; he had cracked ribs, a bruised larynx and kidneys and was down a few pints of blood despite a transfusion. His body was a purple-black mosaic of stitches and staples. He didn’t closely resemble the smiling face in his passport photo. Other than that he was mint.
Uncle Kosokian had sequestered him in a private hospital with round the clock nurses and a team of nervous physicians. They doped him to the gills on painkillers, gave him a button to push whenever he wanted another shot of morphine and it wasn’t enough, so he downed all the tequila he could lay hands on, which was a supply limited only by his capacity to swallow.
Imogene had terrible timing, but he rolled with it, unhooked himself from the needles and tubes, lined his pockets with pill-bottles, and went hunting.
The next two weeks were a blur, a chain of blackouts. Amid the nightmarish smog of pain, Jose Cuervo, and Demerol, he managed to trace his sister to a villa on the outskirts of a poor, off season resort town near the U.S. border. Imogene had rented a seedy hacienda with a view of a gulch that served as a dry moat. Past the gulch, spread a sloping panorama of sage, cacti and distant, heat-shimmered mesas. What had she and Lorca been doing? Nobody had an answer, not even the Bureau. Evidently she’d taken a leave of absence and zoomed off to pursue some top-secret agenda and probably get herself fired once and for all.
Conrad had a sneaking idea what she was after. What to do about it was another matter.
None of the townies knew anything helpful. Folks remembered the dark-haired gringa. She talked like a man and broke the eye of a farmer who’d pinched her ass while they shot pool at the cantina. She carried a pistola and drank from the bottle and the regulars figured right away she was a Fed, probably a customs agent, or a narc. They didn’t give a damn; obviously she had bigger fish to fry than hassling any of the locals. When she stopped coming in, it wasn’t a surprise. She’d paid down another month on the hacienda and the maid reported that some of her personal items were still inside. The only thing missing was her, and her car, which turned out to be a rental from the airport in Mexico City. The authorities eventually discovered the car at the bottom of a quarry, demolished by a crash and the ensuing fire. None of the charred bones inside the wreckage belonged to Imogene or her biologist companion Lorca, however.
Naturally, enterprising locals had stripped the hacienda of everything that wasn’t nailed down. It didn’t matter. Conrad spotted her subtle knife blaze on a living room post—an inverted arrow bisecting a heart containing: CONNIE & GENIE FOREVER. She’d hidden the important stuff in a garbage bag in the crawl space. It was exactly as she’d promised to do if something like this o
ccurred—articles of clothing; travel brochures; sundry papers and receipts; traveler’s checks; a plastic bag of Humboldt County Thunderfuck and loose .38 slugs; and a scorched envelope containing the partially exposed glossy of a man in a robe wearing a crown of antlers. Great, pointy antlers; a twelve-point buck for sure, or the world’s biggest stag beetle. The man’s face was in shadow, except for the rim of a widened, protuberant eye, all black, and the corner of a too-large mouth skinned back to reveal a pit. Imogene had printed Drake in the bottom corner. Not much of a likeness, not to Conrad’s recollection of the smarmy old salt who’d tended Ezra. Then a couple of film canisters and a thick packet of dossier-style photographs of various old men, their names and occupations and last known addresses meticulously typed on the reverse—none of whom seemed familiar; and a smaller collection of satellite plates of the Cloister in the Pyrenees.
There was also a book, a medieval pamphlet made of crinkly animal skin that smelled of must and dried blood. Untitled. The shell of some kind of large arthropod had been embedded in the wooden cover. The tract’s leathery pages were covered border to border in ancient Greek text, except for periodic diagrams of esoteric anatomical surgeries, and more embedded exoskeletons of predatory insects.
Imogene left a note on a scrap of soiled stationary with flowers and rabbits. It said, in jagged script, They want in.
Conrad was far too addled to analyze the particulars of the clues, or whether any clues truly existed beyond the miasma and warp of his beleaguered perceptions. He wandered around the town, dropped ominous and inflammatory comments and set up shop at the hacienda. Maybe she would return, or if she couldn’t return, she’d realize where he’d be and send a message; or, perhaps, when he’d recovered his wits, he’d discover some new scrap that she’d left behind. Mostly he stayed because he didn’t know where else to go or what to do if he went there. As a precaution, he rented a deposit box at the bank and stashed Imogene’s clues for safekeeping.
He hibernated, rousing occasionally for more tequila and pills. He listened to cockroaches and mice as they scuttled around his stinking, sodden bulk, and fat moths battening the dust-caked windows, thirsty for his salt and iron, his deadly sweat. Sometimes, through the grubby window notch, the sky flushed red as the skin of a balloon stretched to bursting. Titanic shadows moved behind the sun, the gaping moon. Dark shapes dimpled the red sky as fingertips denting cellophane. When Conrad dozed, Drake materialized in a bell of smoky, volcanic light, shook his mighty antlers and beckoned from the yawning archway of a cathedral. A giant in foul, sooty robes.
Conrad never fully slept as the fever licked at him with the urgency of a selfish lover.
Later, a vehicle with the headlights off rolled up during the wee hours. He was reclined in the bathtub, where he’d tumbled several hours before while looking for a spot to relieve himself, naked except for a pair of horridly stained boxers. He hazily glimpsed silhouettes reversed upon the plaster ceiling. The strangers circled the house. Their shoes crunched in the gravel beneath the bathroom window; mutters and whispers carried to his ears, pierced his delirium.
They entered through the unlocked front door and began moving from room to room. Someone shined a flashlight into the bathroom, flicked the dead light switch a couple times, and moved on without spotting Conrad’s foot and ankle hanging over the rim of the filthy tub.
Stuff was getting knocked around. Glass was breaking. The men spoke Spanish and there were at least four of them. Government men? Cops? Mobsters? Conrad decided to ask.
He eventually levered himself from the tub and limped into the hall. The world rushed him in 3D; he braced himself with one hand to keep from pitching onto his face. It was dark but for bits of moonlight coming in here and there, and bobbing flashlight beams poking around. Conrad bumped into a man in a suit. The man was small and wiry, like a bird, and reeked of nervousness and aftershave.
Conrad opened his mouth to utter a greeting, and the guy jumped back, cursed, and shot him with a taser. Whap, prongs stuck in his shoulder and here came the juice. It must’ve been a supercharged model, because Conrad had been tasered before, and usually they didn’t pack enough of a punch to faze him, but this one clicked his teeth together, rolled his eyes backwards and caused foam to slather from his lips.
The slow waltz in Hell began without music.
Conrad collapsed against the wall. The man released the trigger and when he did that he was fucked. Within an instant of the current’s cessation, Conrad tore out the prongs and swung his arm like a baseball bat and chopped the man’s throat with the edge of his hand, made jelly of the windpipe. The man fell, thrashing. Conrad stomped on his chest until it caved, and again on his groin and the man stopped moving.
It was all instinct. His rational thoughts melted into a pulsing, crimson mass. He had left a brace of pila in the corner of the hall, intending to practice in the high desert air once he recovered. He grabbed three of the javelins and crabbed through a doorway toward a moving flashlight beam; slung a spear underhanded at the shadow behind the light and got lucky. Someone grunted and someone else opened up with the heavy armament, probably a submachine gun, and the hacienda was briefly lit by strobes of yellow-blue fire. The stench of burning copper rode a blizzard of plaster fragments and sawdust.
Conrad bored into the maelstrom, collided with a body and immediately plunged three feet of steel and ash through the man’s belly, then the wall, and the machine gun whirled away in a fizz of Roman candle sparks.
The last guy ran from the house and for the car, got it rolling backwards as Conrad burst onto the porch and threw his remaining pilum, overhand this time. His aim was bad because his night vision was mostly ruined by the muzzle flashes. The windshield imploded, a mass of fractured safety glass that wrapped around the driver’s head and torso like a net. The car yawed, flew off the road and toppled into the ravine.
The driver crawled from the wreck and clambered up the opposite bank. He’d lost his suit coat and his white shirt fluttered among the clumps of sage, the flowing shadows of low clouds. The cadaverous moon grinned as it peeked between the pleats of glinting star fields.
The man cried out when he saw Conrad loping after him with the hitching, drunken gait of a trained javelin thrower; fired several wild shots over his shoulder as he fled. The reports came soft and ineffectual as a child’s cap gun, counterpoint to the slap-slap-slap-slap of Conrad’s bare feet against pebbles and dirt.
Conrad overtook him, a cat cutting down a wildebeest, a large shadow swallowing a smaller, and they tumbled together among the rocks and the bushes. It was a short, pathetic struggle.
When the soldiers came, they found him slumped over the kitchen table, clutching a pile of bloody wallets. According to various pieces of identification, the dead men belonged to the Mexico City police department. No one knew why they had been sent into the country. There was no record that the excursion was authorized.
The Mexican Army took Conrad into custody. He was hauled to a basement and tied to a chair. Someone gagged him and then sprayed soda water foam up his nose to simulate drowning. Many, many hard questions were asked. After a while, the military interrogator figured out his subject was just another dumbass gringo, albeit with a hotter temper than most, who’d gotten crosswise with somebody powerful. The intelligence officer had actually cocked the hammer on a revolver and stuck the barrel in Conrad’s ear when Marsh and Singh strolled in to save the day. Money changed hands and Conrad was blindfolded and taken from the torture scene.
The agents drove him across the border and the three had dinner at a nice Tex-Mex joint, then a long conversation over several platters of beer and tequila.
You’re one lucky bastard, Mr. Navarro, Marsh had said. Those off-duty cops you dusted were freelancing. Nobody seems to give a shit about them.
Conrad explained what he did and how his sister had disappeared investigating he wasn’t sure what and that the goons had probably come for her.
How did you wind up in thi
s line of work? Singh said.
A family friend knew a guy who knew a guy. I was recruited and trained. Conrad didn’t go into specifics—how he’d been tested, the nature of the training or where it occurred; didn’t speak of those early years in the modern day slave pits of the underworld, how he’d probably killed two of every species, including men, that might’ve walked, hopped, or slithered up the gangplank of Noah’s Ark. He didn’t mention how Uncle K had scooped him from the mean and bloody amateur ranks and become his patron, his master.
Marsh and Singh drank excessively and hung on his every word, although they didn’t press, not then. In those early days of Conrad’s burgeoning stardom as a blood sport personality, The American, he’d paid taxes to an NSA slob named Furillo. The NSA kept tabs on the underground fighting rings, most especially those as elaborate and lucrative as the ones Conrad belonged to. The power of those exorbitantly wealthy organizers of the Pageant sufficed to keep the intelligence community at least nominally neutral, but graft was the order of the day and payoffs were necessary at every level of operation. So many palms to grease, so little time.
After what Singh referred to as “The Mexican Incident,” Conrad’s management situation underwent a radical alteration, precipitated by Furillo’s timely coronary conclusion due to the ingestion of multiple prescription medications and the able ministrations of a Vegas call-girl who conveniently vanished without hanging around to clarify the circumstances of “Big Joe’s” demise.
The operatives stepped in without skipping a beat. They took a cut of Conrad’s exhibition paydays, ran interference for him with local authorities when necessary, and promised to look into his sister’s case.
It was the start of a beautiful, horribly dysfunctional relationship. Basically the same as every other relationship Conrad had known.
Chapter Three
The Light is the Darkness Page 7