“Genie seemed confident I could kill you.” Conrad had gone through the same fire as Imogene and Lorca. The man obviously possessed the ability to shift shape, to manipulate his mass and strength. Whatever he could do, Conrad could do, if only he knew the trick.
Lorca said, “Nonsense. Imogene is…it’s not possible that you’ve spoken with her.” The man leaped again mid-sentence. Conrad reversed tactics; he pulled the table toward himself and used it as a shield. Lorca raked it and steel shredded like tissue paper. Conrad plucked a ten inch sliver of shorn metal and stabbed Lorca’s neck, rammed it clean through the opposite side. As Lorca reeled, hand clapped to his leaking jugular, Conrad punched him in the ribs with the spiked cestus, then the kidney, driving into the blow with every ounce of force he possessed, which would’ve sufficed to shatter a cinderblock, to rip a hole through a wet sandbag, or rupture the internal organs of a normal man. Lorca uttered a gurgling cry, and back-handed Conrad across the cellar and into the wall. Conrad curled, knees to chin, the air slammed from his lungs. He wished he’d brought a gun, although that hadn’t helped Imogene, had it? His thoughts were unclear; the room dimmed to infrared.
The scientist grasped the steel sliver and pulled it from his neck. Blood spurted and foamed. His face and chest were thick with blood. He was unrecognizable. His right eye shimmered and glared from the gore; it burned like a coal. “Allow me to return this,” he said, and approached Conrad and caught his ankle and lifted him as a doctor hoists a newborn. Conrad scrabbled at the floor, trying to find purchase. He had a moment to consider whether anyone had ever gripped him with such animal strength, then the scientist stabbed him in the thigh with the shard and twisted.
Conrad didn’t scream, although he wished to. Imogene whispered, Jesus, bro. Didn’t you get your ass kicked the last time you came down here? He beheld her then: nude and lithe, pinioned near the apex of an obsidian pyramid that jutted from a mountain of skulls. Her arms were chained above her head and she shone brilliant as a diamond prism. Light beamed from her flesh—white, then red; a nova that wiped the image from his mind, but left an imprint on his retina.
He laughed.
Lorca dropped him in a heap and frowned. “What is amusing?”
“See, in a life or death struggle,” Conrad said, pausing to cough a bit of blood, “when your enemy starts laughing you don’t stop to ask why, you finish him before it’s too late. Too late, sucker.”
Lorca kicked Conrad in the ribs hard enough to make him writhe. The second kick was less forceful, and the third thudded from Conrad’s side without effect. Lorca stepped back quickly. Nubs of horns bulged from his skull and his breathing whistled and keened high upon the register.
Conrad had gone about this all wrong, projecting malice at an enemy who was prepared for such a gambit. Perhaps inward was the answer. He imagined himself whole and strong, imagined his flesh as iron, his muscles as cables, his heart a furnace. He imagined a keyhole opening. Streams of dark and light flooded into his mind like oil. He stood. Lorca swiped at his collar and Conrad slapped his hand away and grinned. His teeth felt large and sharp. His was the physical strength of a great ape. Three great apes. The joy of his rage was more powerful still.
“Damnation,” Lorca said. “You catch on fast —”
Conrad grabbed his throat and squeezed, felt the windpipe go, then the spine, and squeezed hard enough to snap a railroad spike, reduce a stone to gravel. With a renewed burst of vigor, Lorca jerked free and attempted to run. Conrad leaped and drove his knee into the small of the man’s back while yanking his chin up and to the rear until several large bones snapped. Lorca’s muscles convulsed. Then his tongue protruded and he was dead. To be safe, Conrad fetched an axe and chopped the corpse into several pieces. He loaded the remains into a barrel, doused them with kerosene and struck a match.
He rested on the front porch and watched the greasy smoke coil into the sky. His sense of triumph was tempered by the regret he hadn’t had the opportunity to torture Imogene’s whereabouts from Lorca. While he rested, the steel splinter spontaneously worked itself from his leg and clinked onto the ground where it smoldered and bubbled. A few minutes later the wound sealed itself to an angry red pucker surrounded by deep tissue bruises which rapidly faded.
There wasn’t even a scar.
IV
Conrad stayed in Vegas for the week preceding his showdown with destiny. DeKoon reserved a penthouse suite in the glitziest casino, provided him with a limo, guards, call girls, and an unlimited tab at the front desk. Conrad banished the girls. The gorillas in the mirror shades kept a respectful distance. A fearful distance. He sat lotus before a wall of glass that overlooked the desert. He stared into the distance and, when night fell, into the blackness between stars. That week every sunset was red, every night moonless.
On Saturday night DeKoon collected him and whisked him off to witness the heavyweight mixed martial arts champion of the world defend his belt in the trademark steel cage. The champion went down in the fifth round and as the fighter’s head bounced on the canvas, a few drops of blood splattered the breast of DeKoon’s impeccable white suit. The brunette on his arm squealed and dabbed it, then licked her finger as she smiled coquettishly and crossed her long legs. Conrad glanced at the crowd packed around the harshly illuminated stage: a sea of shadows fractured by camera flashes, its denizens hunched forward like carrion birds.
“Two of the most famous warriors on the planet,” DeKoon said, hand on Conrad’s shoulder, “and you could tear them apart, rip the stuffing from them. Likely at the same time. Couldn’t you? I’d wager anyone in our top fifteen could take these guys. What a shame the luminaries of the Pageant must toil in obscurity.”
“The wheel goes round. I’m sure the taste for real blood will hit the mainstream again one fine day.”
DeKoon glanced at the crimson-lipped brunette. “I think you’re on to something, my friend.” He leaned over and kissed her, savagely, possessively, and she grasped his hair and pulled him in. A pair of beasts feeding upon one another.
Meanwhile, doctors rushed to tend the fallen champion. The stage burned beneath a column of white light while all else faded to black. Imogene appeared again as she had at their house. She floated atop the column of light near the vault of the roof. She loomed, naked and glistening with blood and sweat, larger, by far, than life. Her wings beat slowly and crackled with fire. Like the archangel Michael, she carried a sword and its blade dripped flames that scattered into sparks as they fell toward the unheeding throngs below. She blew him a kiss as her body brightened and flared and disintegrated into the darkness.
Almost over, Connie. The brunette kept sucking DeKoon’s face. She winked at Conrad. Her eye glowed with the reflection of the stage lights.
V
The cargo hold of the helicopter was windowless and lighted by a red bulb in a plastic case. Conrad sat alone in the cavernous hold and listened to the rotors churn. He had no idea what coordinates the pilot bore him toward, only that it would be a remote and deep desert location where death and glory awaited.
He slept and dreamed of being trapped inside a cave, of cowering in animal terror while beyond the mouth of the cave twilight cloaked a primordial landscape. A terrible presence impended upon his hiding place. This bestial presence hunched until its crown of antlers scraped rock, and it chuckled and growled and reached for him, clutched him and drew him into the light. His flesh was shredded, his bones cracked, his blood poured down a ravening maw.
He awakened as the helicopter landed.
Engineers and laborers had further excavated a massive crater near the foot of some low mountains, reinforced it with granite pillars and entrenched amphitheatre style bench seats, with all the grandeur and scope of an ancient pyramid construction site.
Cold dusk had settled over the land. Floodlights glared from a ring of conning towers. Film crews positioned themselves atop strategic roosts along the rim of the crater. Several hundred spectators had assembled between gra
nite colonnades. The guests were garish as peacocks in their collective attire. Men with automatic rifles patrolled the perimeter.
Conrad wondered, as he often did in the moments before a ludus of this size and complexity, how many millions of dollars had gone into the preparations, the construction, the bribery of God only knew how many law enforcement agencies and military personnel to steer clear, to divert attention and provide cover. Who were these pampered and pompous spectators? Foreign royalty, Balkan financiers, sons and daughters of Hollywood, of Washington D.C., the bored and bloodthirsty scions of Western industry, and fake celebrities? Their identities were a mystery, for the organizers of the Pageant scrupulously enforced a policy of non contact between athletes and patrons, but the crowd’s desire was plain; that desire charged the air.
Adrenaline smoked in Conrad’s nostrils, his lungs. He’d stripped naked in the belly of the chopper and donned his harness of battle, the boots and plumed helm; armed himself with a brace of pila, the cestus, and a gladius meant for chopping men to small pieces. He needed little else.
Pageant attendants escorted him to a staging area where he was consulted by a tight-lipped surgeon and a team of assistants. Conrad was offered an impressive selection of pills and injections—drugs to pump him up and inure him to pain, or drugs to sand down the edge and keep him calm, depending upon his strategy for the battle. He declined and sent the medics packing. DeKoon waved from the curve of a pillar a few yards away along the crumbling lip of the crater, then leaned back into the shadows and Conrad was alone. He regarded the stars while announcements crackled over speakers, introducing the main event of the ludus in several languages.
A youth, dressed in a toga and wreathed in laurels, came to lead him down the many steps into the pit. The boy warned him to watch his step on the final landing and the sandy floor of the arena proper. There had been a number of earlier matches, including an extremely messy battle royale between two dozen convicts flown in from various international prisons. The custodial crew could only do their best.
Oiled posts were driven into the ground at irregular intervals, torches socketed into the crowns. The resultant light was smoky and dull and his shadow stretched long and grotesque across the sand. Horns winded, deep, primal tones that raised the hairs on his body and vibrated in the soles of his feet.
Silence fell as the horns died and the announcements ceased and the crowd held its breath in anticipation of carnage.
The Greek’s retainers awaited; elderly and vile twins, dressed in soiled loincloths. Conrad recognized them as Uncle Kosokian’s creepy servants from the estate. One beckoned and dragged his nails across a stone outcropping and struck sparks. Conrad followed them away from the expectant eyes of the crowd, its burgeoning murmurs of unease and discontent. The ancients led him into a cavern that reeked of spoiled blood and charred meat.
The Greek lolled upon a throne fashioned from a pile of animal hides and armor and the shattered bones of men. More torches hissed and sputtered from crevices in the walls. Smoke tinged the air red as the heart of a stoked furnace. “Good to see you,” Uncle Kosokian said. He had grown to the immense proportions of the giants from Conrad’s nightmares; easily the height of three men standing upon one another’s shoulders. He wore nothing except for a crown of obsidian spikes and a necklace of bloody skulls. Sweat poured from his cockles and dewlaps. He sucked marrow from a cracked femur and tossed it atop the growing pile. The ancients scuttled to positions at the base of the throne, where they hissed and made signs of obeisance to their master.
Conrad’s knees quaked. His gladius fell from his hand and clattered upon rock. He said, “My, what big teeth you have, Uncle.”
Uncle Kosokian’s chuckle reverberated ominously. “Like certain Caesars of yore, I can’t help but descend into the arena for the occasional bit of sport. I know, I know, it’s unfair, undignified and a trait often derided in the illustrious. Regardless, nostalgia is undimmed by enlightenment. As a mortal, I was quite expert in the dispatch of my fellow man. To be deprived of a direct hand in such gory spectacles is a high price for godliness.”
“What does this mean? Am I to be enslaved? Eaten?” Conrad could still hear the children at the monastery screaming, could see them scooped into the slavering maws of monsters. This guise of Uncle Kosokian, albeit distorted to mythical dimensions, was yet a humanoid mask of his true self. Its true self was likely more accurate. Uncle K was a man by the thinnest definition only.
“I lied about many things, Conrad. My fondness for you is nonetheless genuine. Tonight is a celebration. You stand at the threshold of transcendence. You are of the primal stock, my son. The missing link between man and animal, your cells scraped from the soft sponge at the bottom of a pond when all the Earth was muck and amoeba. You possess a purity that none alive can match—not me, nor Drake, nor your sweet, lost sister. In a few eons, when your strength has grown, you will rise to gobble up your enemies and take dominion of this ball of dirt.”
“And Imogene?”
“Stubborn, stubborn boy. Assuming by some miracle she wasn’t captured by Drake as a thrall, or murdered by that wretch, Lorca, then by all means, take her as your queen, your slave, your whatever. None of my concern.”
Conrad half-listened to Uncle Kosokian, mesmerized instead by a sudden transformation of the ancients from wizened men to a pair of the taut, voluptuous women he’d known in a dozen incarnations over the past months. Rhonda smiled with lascivious glee and Wanda tipped him a wink and thrust her hip at an exaggerated angle. Smoke shifted a veil across these apparitions and as it drifted, they were scabrous trolls once more, snickering at his expression of horror.
“My apologies,” Uncle Kosokian said. “Think of them as hobbles…impingements upon your running amok, drunk with power. Pleasure instead of imprisonment. My servitors meant you no harm. Quite the contrary—they disposed of those two baboons who’d been extorting you. Marsh and Singh were into wet work. Sooner or later one of them would’ve decided to cut your throat in case their superiors decided to investigate. I couldn’t permit such a fate to befall you.”
“No,” Conrad said, and a multitude resided in that utterance. He gritted his teeth and composed himself. “And here we are. The guests will be pissed when there’s no fight. We’ll be ruined.” He smiled bitterly at this last.
“The guests? Provender, my boy. Grist for the mill. In a moment I shall make a minor adjustment to you that you might transmogrify into an astonishing and horrific creature of legend and then we’ll shamble forth and devour them where they recline. Kicking and screaming.”
“That sounds absolutely delightful.” The voice was soft and urbane and Conrad recognized it as Dr. Drake’s. Eyes burned molten red in the darkest corner of the cave at the heart of a column of shifting darkness. The column gathered height and mass, billowing upward and outward with silent menace.
“Damn you Ambrose,” Uncle Kosokian said, lurching to his feet, which was a frightening sight. “This is my demesne. You are trespassing in violation of our covenant. Begone!”
Dr. Drake said, “I am aware of our arrangement, Cyrano. Alas, I am compelled by reasons of appetite and paranoia to abscond with the young man. Surely, in your wisdom, you knew I’d come for him tonight.”
“I rather hoped you’d show a bit of restraint. There will be repercussions. You’re ruining the lad’s debut.”
Dr. Drake emerged from his roiling cloud of blackness. He was as Conrad remembered: frail and bald with a hook nose, his lips perpetually curved in a sardonic smile. He dressed simply in a dark shirt and slacks. “Greetings, Conrad. It’s been positively ages. How’s your sister, eh? Hold tight and we’ll be off for a conversation of cabbages and kings, my little oyster.” To Uncle Kosokian he said, “Hand him over, Cyrano. All is not lost; you can still eat the folk awaiting their bread and circuses.”
“Get behind me, Satan.”
“We must destroy him. I’ve never witnessed such acceleration, such raw potentiality. Had I suspe
cted… Let’s say I’d have taken measures. Call it a failed experiment, hubris. If we hesitate, he’ll become too strong. We must act.”
“But I am. The blood and bones of five hundred sheep will be his initiation unto godhead. The boy will make a fine ally to my cause against you, old one.”
“The servant will become the master,” Drake said.
“Admittedly I fear you in your full aspect,” Uncle Kosokian said. He cracked his knuckles and rolled his shoulders as a prizefighter preparing for the blows to come. “However, you’ve overreached by appearing within my sphere. I say again, begone!”
“Don’t be a fool. I am sufficiently manifested to annihilate you and take what I wish.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, it’ll be bloody.”
“Do you promise?”
Galvanized by a nod from Kosokian, the ancients shrilled in unison like angry vultures and hopped toward the doctor, claws extended. Drake caught each man by the neck, midair. He smashed their heads together in a shower of pulp and cast the limp bodies against the cavern wall with such force their limbs detached and flipped end over end into the gloom. He wagged his finger at Uncle Kosokian and clucked his tongue.
Conrad stared with newly sharpened senses at the doctor, a kind of X-ray vision that bored through Drake’s façade. Drake’s flesh and bones flickered and rippled and Conrad had the sense of enormous fingers inserted into a puppet. Whatever plucked the strings existed partially upon another plane and across an improbable gulf; an entity that radiated malignant hunger and rage of scarcely conceivable scale.
“Run, Conrad. And remember the little people on the day of your return.” Uncle Kosokian stooped and brought a fist the size of a wrecking ball down onto Drake’s head with the evident purpose of driving the doctor into the ground as a mallet pounding a stake. The blow glanced aside without effect. Drake laughed and a thundercloud coalesced and swiftly descended to coil around the antagonists. Strokes of blue and yellow lightning licked forth and scorched rock, blasted sections of the floor into gravel. All of the torches snuffed at once and the cavern was cast into darkness.
The Light is the Darkness Page 13