by Brad Ashlock
“You can take your bribe and…” Naumkin suddenly recalled Cal’s words to his father, “and shove it straight up your ass.”
“OK,” Dudley said, shaking his head up and down. “Stay here and become dog-food. As for me,” he hooked a thumb toward himself, “live to fight another day.”
“Safety first,” Naumkin muttered. At first blush, the old chess maxim appeared, in the context of a missing child, cowardly. Naumkin was a defensive player, but devious too. His bizarre chess combinations (still talked about after fifty years) were more like intricate ambushes than the orthodox tactical orgasm at the end of a positional buildup. At the heart of Naumkin’s style swirled paradox: he did everything in his power to anticipate and diffuse attacks before they started, while simultaneously provoking them. He was consistent in this contradiction. There was no label for Naumkin’s style of chess, or for his correlative philosophy. He anticipated attacks, he built fortresses on territory where any hint of aggression might develop; he did this all to prophylactic ends, to prevent the spread of destruction across the board before it could even bloom. Nevertheless, in doing so, his defense became an exaggeration, a kind of mockery that did nothing but inflame aggression and provoke attack. So, safety first for Tigran Naumkin was not some quiet, conservative or cowardly motto, no, safety first, in all its complicated paradox and contradiction meant that, yes, he would run to higher ground, or hide amid the weeds, he would disguise his intentions or disperse his forces into the forests, not out of fear, but for a better vantage point to blast the opponent from on high.
“What did you say?” Dudley asked.
“Safety first,” Naumkin repeated. “Why did you call me in the first place if you knew Joost Lusker had kidnapped Meeko?”
“The police suggested I call all the people I knew in the surrounding area. People were around so I had to call you. I’m sorry I dragged you into this. Look, Tigran, I’m not a coward. I’m a realist. Let’s say I do everything this guy, this whatever the hell he is, wants. I would be destroying the Dudleys in one fell swoop. Everything we’ve ever stood for, everything my grandfather fought for and built up from nothing, destroyed. I refuse. And it’s not like I’m dealing with anything I can call the FBI to help me with, now is it? This is some kind of black magic. Now I’m not one to fall for mumbo jumbo, but I remember those stories my father told me, and I remember his eyes. That’s all I need. It’s real. There’s something out there and it wants to destroy me. Told me to my face. He took my granddaughter.”
“You said your father got rid of Lusker because Lusker wanted to close this… door they had discovered?”
“Yes”
“Get the girl and close the door.”
Dudley folded his hands behind his head and sighed boozy breath into the white cube of the den. “First of all, I don’t know where the door is… exactly. Secondly, I don’t know how to close it even if I could find it.”
“You said it’s in the basement of the abandoned factory. It’s right on your property.”
“Yeah, and it’s guarded by Lusker’s pets. Last night, Mr. Williams did a little reconnaissance. That old chocolate factory is their lair. He barely got out of the woods alive.”
“Surely you could afford mercenaries. Men who could handle—”
“Mercenaries? Are you cracked? Word would get out that a lunatic was running Dudley Chocolates… Not good for business. Not to mention the damage to my good name. No. I’m keeping this all under wraps. I only told you because you’d met the dogs, and I wanted to show you how futile everything was. I need you to move on and keep quiet.”
“You can’t quiet these dreams.”
“I don’t know, Tigran, I’m not a psychiatrist. I have real problems to deal with beyond your sleep troubles. Now, if you won’t take my money, at least take my advice: get out of Rogue!”
“I can show myself out,” Naumkin said.
“It’s your funeral,” Dudley blurted out as Naumkin closed the door on him. Alone, the Chocolate King Swiveled around to watch the jellyfish.
Naumkin found Cal and they left Lusker House. Mr. Williams sat at his desk and, watching them drive off via the security cameras, pressed the gate button and closed it after them. He was still seething that the little white punk had slipped by him at the door. Given half a chance, he would have showed that smartass little fagot what a bitch was. He fondled the cross at his neck unconsciously. He checked his watch: since Meeko Dudley’s disappearance, Mr. Williams was the only employee left at Lusker House. Dudley never asked Mr. Williams to cook and clean, but he had to play secretary, handle the press, and load luggage. They had about an hour before they had to go to the airport. Mr. Williams loved Asian pussy; best tang in the world and he planned to be eating it three times a day under the Hawaiian sun. He smacked his lips, let go of the cross around his neck, and stood up from the chair to advise Mr. Dudley that the sooner they packed the Hummer and got to the airport, the better.
He walked down the corridor that led from his office through the main dining room to the foyer. He started to climb the white staircase, his leather pants creaking, when someone reached from under the stairs and grabbed his ankle. Mr. Williams fell forward and broke his wrist on the lip of a step. In one graceful motion, his right arm reached under his left, and he drew a berretta while twisting to his back and aiming the gun down at the bottom of the stairs. Nothing. He rolled to the edge of the staircase and looked down for the sucker who’d tripped him. Nobody there. He got to his feet and scanned the foyer. Only one yellowish lamp burned down there, floating like a lost beacon on a tenebrous sea. Mr. Williams could feel sweat beading on his forehead. He consciously slowed his breath, his eyes darting back and forth. Whatever had grabbed him could be anywhere in the foyer; there was a lot of antique shit down there to hide behind.
“Mr. Dudley!” Mr. Williams shouted, his body pressed against the stairs. If Dudley were still in his den, he wouldn’t be able to hear dick. Swallowing hard, Mr. Williams scooted his butt up to the next step and pointed his gun at the shadows below. A drop of sweat ran from his temple to the corner of his mouth, adding saltiness to the already metallic tastes drying his tongue. He scooted to the next step and repeated the process of shouting for his employer and pointing the berretta. Again, he scooted higher. He was about halfway up the staircase when a naked boy stepped from the dark, looked up to Mr. Willaims, and giggled.
“Just stay right there,” Mr. Williams said, carefully aiming the berretta at the child. Mr. Williams licked his lips, closed one eye, and softly pressed the trigger halfway, activating its laser sight. A little red dot crawled from the boy’s shoulder to a point between his eyes. The child smiled, and then looked up past Mr. Williams, who was suddenly feeling hot breath on the back of his neck.
The jellyfish shuddered along with Gordon Dudley as sporadic gunfire broke the meditative silence of his white-on-white den. Dudley looked across the room to the door. How flimsy it now appeared. He locked it, returned to his desk, and turned the intercom on. He pressed the button that activated all the speakers in the mansion and called for Mr. Williams. Only static answered.
“Fuck you!” Dudley said to the speaker. He reached into his desk and withdrew his nickel-plated Glock. He checked the clip, confirmed that it was full, and took the safety off. He aimed at the door, fearing that at any moment it would burst into flames and the albino would step over the threshold. Dudley tipped his desk over and cowered behind it.
Something scratched at the door.
“Leave me alone!” The gun became alive in his hands. He fired until the clip was spent. Dudley heard something groaning. He reached into the tipped desk for a new clip, but the only clips he discovered were the kind used to hold sheets of paper together. The empty gun still in his vice-grip, he scuttled away from the desk to the door. The sulphury smoke wafted about him in tendrils. He looked through the bullet-riddled entrance (it looked like a giant chunk of burnt Swiss cheese hinged to the doorframe) and found Mr. Williams
. Half of the bodyguard’s face had been torn off. Smoke floated up from the bullet holes in his chest. Dudley heard a growl at the other end of the narrow corridor.
“Jesus!” he shouted at them. Down the hall stood two bullmastiffs, their eyes aglow. More dogs appeared behind them from around the corner; the entire pack was there.
Dudley dropped the gun, grabbed a leg of the toppled desk and started to drag it across the off-white carpeting to barricade the blown door. He tugged it several feet before the first dog speared its muzzle through the door. It gnashed at the air.
Dudley screamed. He grabbed the gun by the barrel to use as a bludgeon, but could already feel the strength draining form his arms and legs. He literally shat himself when the bullmastiffs rammed their blocky heads through the slice of Swiss cheese and poured into the room.
Dudley dropped the gun.
All five dogs were in Gordon Dudley’s colorless sanctuary, the white den that opened by a shiny key, the white den forbidden to all, the white den where, presently, purple lips curled back to expose ivory fangs set in black gums. The dogs lunged together and all that white turned red.
* * *
Cal Burgess told his mother everything was all right. He said that he was staying at Jeffrey Hore’s and would be home in a few days so that things could cool down between him and his father. Everything he told his mother was a lie. He wasn’t at Jeffrey Hore’s house; he wasn’t even in Rogue—there aren’t any motels there. Cal Burgess was staying at the Super 8 in Grand Rapids with his chess coach, Tigran Naumkin. Cal believed they were dealing with werewolves. He tried to make sense out of what Mr. Naumkin had told him about some portal to the tenth dimension in an abandoned chocolate factory, but what did that have to do with lycanthropy?
He knew from the get-go that there was something fishy with those dogs. He had heard them in the woods and had seen their eyes glowing red. When they leapt from the bushes, all fangs and claws, he thought they moved unnaturally, too. They didn’t go right. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe they just moved too mechanically, like they weren’t used to their own skeletons yet. Another thing: their fur looked fake. It was too black and soft. Mr. Naumkin, who had talked to the damn things, agreed with Cal’s analysis. He told Cal that they used to be the millionaire’s dogs, but some specter had taken possession of them, the same monster that had taken Meeko Russell.
“So they’re like reverse werewolves,” Cal said. He was lying on one of the beds in the room, hands behind his head.
“Would you forget about the dogs?” It seemed an impossible request even to Naumkin’s ears. “They are not the main problem.”
“So there’s some door that leads to a different world. And it influences people, like those chocolate guys.”
“Nathan Dudley and Joost Lusker,” Naumkin said.
“Right. It gets them rich by like, putting ideas in their heads. Then one of them catches on. He doesn’t like being controlled, so he tries to close the door. The other guy—”
“Nathan Dudley.”
“Nathan doesn’t want the door shut, so he shoves this Lusker guy into it.”
“Yes”
“A hundred years go by, and Lusker gets out somehow. He wants revenge. He starts by tinkering with Gordon Dudley’s guard dogs, and then he kidnaps the girl.”
“Yes.”
“But what does that have to do with these Indian mounds?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mr. Naumkin, if that doorway can play with people’s minds, like it did with Nathan and Joost, how do you know the girl is calling to you? What if it’s the door?”
Naumkin sat up in his bed. He had never considered this possibility. “You could be right, Cal. I don’t know.”
Under normal circumstances, Naumkin would have taken Cal to the police and had Alec Burgess thrown in jail for child abuse. There was actually something more important to do right now, and he and Cal both knew it. Naumkin believed there was a little girl trapped somewhere beyond the reach of normal aid. He believed she was calling to him. What if he was wrong? What if she was already dead, or completely unreachable, and it was the magic door that was calling o him, infecting his dreams, planting thoughts in his head as it had with Nathan Dudley and Joost Lusker. Lusker had tried to close the door, and got chucked into whatever was behind it for his troubles. Was the being even Joost Lusker anymore, or some puppet to a greater power? What happened to you on the other side? The dogs had become monsters; what had Joost Lusker become? If Meeko Russell were still alive, what would she turn into?
Cal said, “So if I am right, if the door itself wants us to go to the factory, should we?”
“What other choice do we have? Maybe there isn’t even a door. Maybe Gordon Dudley is wrong. We need to find out.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“Tomorrow we find out where the factory is. I think it’s in Dudley’s pine forest.”
“Where they sell the Christmas trees?”
“Near that, yes.” He looked to the boy. “There’s only five of them. We’ll have shotguns. I think between the two of us, we can get through. If we see them at all.”
“How do you know bullets will even hurt them? Didn’t you say Dudley’s bodyguard emptied a gun into Lusker with no effect?”
“I think the dogs are more physical than Lusker. Remember that they broke the window.”
Cal yawned. Naumkin reminded the boy that they had a big day ahead of them; he turned off the bedside lamp and, after the goodnights, they drifted to sleep. Naumkin dreamed he was in Gordon Dudley’s white-on-white den again. The room was empty. Naumkin looked down at the carpeting; it wasn’t carpet anymore, it was snow and dirt, white and brown, and the stifling air of Dudley’s mansion changed to the pine-sweetened air of the forest. He was in the area of dying trees where he had meditated the day he had discovered the paw prints around his ATV.
“This isn’t a dream,” a man said from behind.
Naumkin turned around and faced the stranger. The man was an American Indian with long white hair done up in a ponytail. He was wearing a black leather trench coat, cowboy boots, and jeans. He puffed on a cigarillo. The smoke cleared and Naumkin got lost in the etched wrinkles of the man’s face.
“Who are you?” Naumkin asked.
“We’ve spoken on several occasions. I looked like this—” he now looked like the squaw.
“And this,” he now became Meeko Russell.
“But not Joost Lusker?”
“No.” Meeko became the pony-tailed Indian again. “That wasn’t me.” He laughed. “I was a medicine man.”
“The mounds?”
The Indian nodded.
“What is happening?
“We’re talking.”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” Naumkin said.
“That’s magic in and of itself, don’t you think?’
“So the girl, Meeko, she never called to me?”
“She doesn’t know you exist. But we do.”
“Who?”
“People who lived long ago.”
“What do you want from me?”
The medicine man dragged on his cigarillo and exhaled out his nose. “Save the girl and shut the door.”
“Where does it lead?”
“To more questions.”
“What do the old tribes have to do with it?”
“I know you’re not a religious man, Tigran. But some things have a power that can’t be explained. More than just corpses were thrown from the burial mounds into the Rogue. There were relics of great power.”
“It’s nonsense!”
“And corny, too, right?” the medicine man smiled. “It doesn’t matter, I’m just an old ghost, what do I know?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just so hard to believe.”
“I believe in paradox, Tigran. I worship the exception. Then again, maybe I’m not real and you’re just losing your mind.”
“That would be the most reasonable hypothesis.”
“Then you might as well go with it.”
“That would at least be pragmatic.”
“Paradoxical and pragmatic. Just like how you play chess.”
“OK,” Naumkin said, approaching the ghost, “so these Indian artifacts are dumped into the river.”
“They float down to the fork, and they all veer south. The world usually makes sense, Tigran. A, B, C, not A, B, 7, right? But there’s always an exception. The little pinhole in the hot air balloon that doesn’t rip wide until you’re well over the Himalayas. I think there was a little exception down at the end of that river. A little pinhole that maybe influenced things, that maybe tugged on a molecule here, a quark there, and those super-charged relics just drifted right up to it. The exception starts feeding off the energy. The exception gets stronger. It was a pinhole, but now it’s a door. It starts influencing everything around it. It wants to grow, and pull, and take, forever.”
“Is that what happened?”
“It’s our guess.”