The Jehovah Contract

by Victor Koman

  The cold, hard liver nestled in the middle of a corpse. Its skin had been folded away in sheets of yellow-grey to reveal its cold, hard organs.

  The trouble was, the body squirmed around on the table, looking at me with frosted eyes. A tongueless mouth lectured me from beneath gauze wrapping.

  "It is logically impossible to find God," the corpse said. Its liver turned into a bloated, bloody worm that ate into its lungs. "The object of the search is the searcher forever beyond your grasp. He is that and that is you."

  "Shut up," I said, flowers parachuting out of my mouth. My skeleton turned into Malto Meal, and I slid once more to the soft marble.

  All the other tables crowded in on me. I was surrounded by death and the smell of science. The tables shrieked back in a blaze of scintillating yellow. My tongue burned just watching the smells.

  I stood again to walk like a fly across an inverted floor. My feet puddled and dropped bits of electric-blue shadow behind them.

  I could see in both directions at once. All around me lay the gutted remains of medical cadavers. They'd all endured a good deal of use over the years.

  That didn't bother me. My concern was that some of them writhed. Some groaned and gurgled. One was tap dancing.

  An idea dripped acid green.

  They're trying to scare the shit out of me. That's the reason for the cadavers.

  "Profound conclusion," said a face that pushed itself up from my wrist. "But why?"

  "God is why!" mimicked a truncated torso, giving off an angry taste of violet.

  "God is wry!" blinked a skinless hand.

  "God is rye rot, right?"

  This was getting unruly. The deceptive part of it was that my mind seemed to be alert. It wasn't like being drunk. Yet I saw these

  things.

  A door pulsated like a heart at the end of a row of carts. Rubbery feet carried me through a sluggish stream of pink noise. Gnarled hands pushed the tables aside. I approached a massive blockade.

  The door had a thousand locks on it, all covered with spikes. They smelled black all over. I stared for hours at them in an instant. Not knowing what else to do, I heaved my body against the barricade.

  My skin broke open and splattered against the door. Locks and spikes dissolved into pools of noisy, noisome vomit. The stinking, vibrating mass flowed up the walls and away to reveal an open door and blinding bright hallway.

  The hallway became a hole stretching down into white oblivion. I gripped fervently at the doorjamb. My fingers crumbled and split. Crickets and silverfish crawled out of the joints to jump and crawl over my arms.

  I wasn't making much progress.

  I let go and slid down the hole in a scream of lilac and ammonia. I shrieked all the way until I hit bottom. Panic bars reached out to pound me in the gut. A clear, white light surrounded me. It burnt my flesh, dazzled my eyes. Flakes of skin sloughed off like snow. Everything roared.

  "Too loud!" I screamed. "

  Too loud!

  "

  A hundred black and scarlet hands gesticulated in the sunlight, casting their own twisted shadows. Snake-tongued fingers pointed the way.

  I looked in their direction. A lion crouched there, lurking in the distance. With a shattering growl it pounced and ran toward me. My feet sank into yielding pavement, holding me fast.

  Soft brown paws burrowed up from the ground. They grasped my ankles. The lion raced nearer. As it did, its paws metamorphosed into hooves, its mane transformed into antlers.

  A stag rushed at me, blood streaming silver and smoky in its path. In its eyes glowed fury and pain.

  I stood my ground bravely-the paws and pavement that gripped my feet defied escape. Dust howled about me. The stag swerved at the last instant, pelting my body with gravel. Each rock cried out with indignity as it hit home.

  "Get in!" The voice was an astonished, blurring rainbow. A white hand beckoned out to me.

  I crawled my focus along the arm until I reached a face. Ann Perrine gazed at me, as clear as unaltered reality.

  My hands groped for the smooth metal siding of the car that filled my vision. Suddenly I hung from it, dangling over an infinite, empty space. I screamed.

  "Quiet!" a voice hissed. "They'll hear you!"

  Time flowed below me like a sewer. I tried to convince my rational, panicky mind that none of this was happening. It didn't do much good. I pulled myself up to her, never letting my million eyes lose sight of her. I clung. I inched.

  I was inside.

  "You're safe."

  I tasted her words-they felt good.

  "It's me," she said. "Ann. What've they done to you?"

  My voice rebounded with irritating volume. "I've got more dope in my veins than half of Woodstock Nation." That was all I could get past the clog of mealworms in my mouth. I stared down at my hands. The skin was blotched red and blue. The muscles palpitated erratically.

  "You're safe," she repeated. Her arms reached out to hold me.

  All I saw were scorpion claws, sickles, razor-edged boomerangs. I pushed her away.

  "No," my voice fuzzed from somewhere. "Fear imprint." My mumbling sounded like waves of mush.

  She stomped the pedal to squeal us out of the driveway and away. That didn't sit too well with my current condition. The acceleration pushed me through the seat cushion until only a black, hazy smear of Dell Ammo remained.

  6

  Unbelievers

  The ride was as much of a nightmare as the dissecting room. Shapes jumped from corners, colors rammed against screaming odors. I tried balling myself up as much as I could and only succeeded in curling smaller and smaller like Igli until I disappeared and returned to the passenger seat.

  By the time we reached her home, I had almost completely recovered. I shivered and yanked myself together. An arm here, a leg there. One last squid stuck a tentacle at us from the bushes around her driveway as we pulled in to park. The fear still sat with me.

  "It was just a bad trip, Dell. The things you're scared of don't exist."

  I pulled over to the far side of the car, leaned up against the door. "They do, though. They're in my mind. Waiting like some punk around a corner. Waiting to strike no matter what I believe."

  She unlatched the door and got me out of the car. I noticed that it was a Porsche 964. Not bad.

  I stood and took a step up the brick path. I walked well enough. What made me unsteady was the urge to flinch at every wavering shadow, at every flitting insect and bird. The breeze blowing up the back of my hospital smock didn't help much, either.

  "Those people programmed the fears in, and you can reprogram them right out just as easily. That's what psychotomimetic drugs are for. Programming and metaprogramming. Better than hypnosis."

  She used some pretty long words for an accountant. My suspicions weren't exactly lying quiescent....

  The house was no mansion. It sat up on a hill overlooking Silver Lake, one of many. The construction looked mid-twenties, maybe early thirties. She kept it in good repair. Two stories, white paint. A garden ran from the driveway to the front door, split by a brick walk.

  She offered me her arm. I accepted it for reasons perhaps ulterior. She looked beautiful despite the rough treatment she had obviously received.

  "Where'd you rent the car?" My mind had regained enough of its fortitude to wonder how the hell Ann had escaped her kidnappers.

  "It's registered to a Reverend Morris Beathan."

  I grinned even though my legs were feeling like unvulcanized rubber.

  "What did they do to you?"

  "More or less what they did to you." She fumbled about in her purse for the house keys. "They took me to the monastery and grilled me about you, about the contract, about Emil Zacharias, the TV evangelist. They thought locking me in a stuffy confessional for hours would make me crack. I pretended to and gave them a bunch of creative nonsense to keep them paranoid."

  "Uh... Such as?"

  She pulled out a key ring made of silver and turqu
oise and unlocked the door. "I told them that we were making a horror film. The rumors were designed to build interest in the movie."

  I frowned. "They bought that?"

  "No. That was when they took me out, shot me up with junk, and locked me in the rectory with a little guy for a guard. I guess that's all they figured I'd need." She rattled the key loose and pushed the door open. "When I was done with him, he couldn't have broken his celibacy vows if he'd tried."

  "The drugs seem to have worn off faster for you than they have for me." I stepped inside and watched my head spin.

  "Are you kidding?" she asked. "I'm sailing the stratosphere!" In the subdued light of the hallway, I saw that her pupils were the size of dimes.

  "Less than a novelty to you, I presume?"

  She grinned giddily. "When I was a young, sweet, impressionable child of sixteen I consumed a greater variety of drugs than most people are comfortable pronouncing. I was always the only person in my group who could drive wasted." She closed the door and set the deadbolt. "When they started the injections, I was sort of grateful for the free vacation. They didn't expect me to be able to function."

  "Why weren't you so resourceful when they first grabbed you at the bar?"

  She shrugged. "They had the drop on me with guns. They didn't seem to care whether they killed me or not. So I went along."

  My drug-sensitized nose immediately bore an assault by a riot of scents. It smelled as if we were in a flower garden in spring. I felt safe, reassured, cozy.

  "What is that smell?"

  "Just some flowers and stuff. Come on."

  She led me through a hallway done up with the sort of knickknacks a woman accumulates. She sat me in the living room on a high-backed wing chair. The place had a few bookshelves with a fair amount of books. That's the way I gauge people, I suppose. The fewer the books, the stupider and duller the person.

  She wasn't dull. Her actions revealed that much.

  "Anyway," she continued, clanking around in the kitchen, "I snuck out of a window and into the courtyard and hotwired the first car I could get to."

  "You have good taste in cars."

  "I was on my way to call the police when I saw you."

  "Forget the cops-they're just priests with guns."

  I heard her laugh lightly. In a moment she appeared with a cup of coffee.

  "Black?" she asked.

  "Black." I took the cup and let the hot liquid warm my insides.

  "Feeling better?"

  "Yeah." I stretched and slid back in the chair. "I saw a whole lot of bad things back there. In my mind. I've seen worse in real life. I'll get over it." I let out a breath, took another sip of brew. My hair may have been getting younger, but I wasn't. I felt old and rattled.

  Ann went back into the kitchen and reappeared with her own cup. She pulled up a chair next to mine and sat. A shaft of morning sunlight hit the lower part of her dress, shotgunning silver and gold pinpoints around the room. Her hair hung in straggles caused by drying sweat. She'd been through a lot and came out looking like an angel slumming it among mortals.

  I felt a few degrees less than mortal. The house was too cheerful to reflect the way I felt.

  "They mean business, Dell."

  "If they meant business, babe, we'd be under the churchyard by now." I finished the cup and set it aside. "Here I thought I'd just draw some pay for a few weeks from a flush eccentric. Next thing I know, someone's taking it seriously!"

  "You took it seriously enough to accept the offer."

  "If God is worried about me, why doesn't He just hit me with a bolt of lightning?"

  "They say he works in mysterious ways. Maybe he's softening you up first." She grinned. Her eyes were mostly pupil. I understood why women used to put belladonna drops in their eyes. She looked achingly beautiful.

  "Or maybe," she suggested, "the reactions to you are taking place through a network of consciousness."

  What she said didn't make much sense, but I was still stoned enough that her words carried a profound impact. I sensed that something important was trying to get through. I answered with appropriate awe.

  "Huh?"

  She leaned forward, suddenly emphatic.

  "People such as those monks are acting on feelings that don't come from within them. They're operating on emotions impinging on them from outside-from a worldwide reaction to our activities."

  It was as if she'd stuck another hypo of junk into me. I felt a swelling tide of alarm flow over me. This was

  true.

  I was really supposed to assassinate God! And there were forces out to stop me.

  And then I realized what was happening.

  "What're you up to, Blondie? You're laying a program on me as thick as the one Beathan tried."

  She stared with those black saucers for a moment, then said, "Everything will seem more important right now. Don't pay any attention to it. We've got work to do."

  "What do you mean `we,' girlfriend?"

  She stood to lean over me. "Do you think that after what happened to me I don't have a grudge?" She looked as though she'd volunteer to pull the trigger on Number One all by herself. "This sort of thing has gone on long enough. It's all gone on too long."

  "I work alone."

  "Have it your way. The offer's there. What's that on your fingers?"

  I didn't want to know. I raised my hand and saw grey gunk under a few nails. Memories flashed back. My stomach tried to beat the high jump record. I pressed up under my solar plexus to lift my diaphragm off the lurching organ. The sick feeling passed.

  It was a technique I used a lot in my occupation.

  A corner of my light blue hospital robe served to wipe the particles of dead flesh from beneath my fingernails. "Leftovers," I muttered.

  She wasn't distracted. "I can help you on this. I

  want

  to help you. I know someone who can straighten you out on a few things about what god is."

  I relented. "Do I have time to put on something less drafty?"

  She showered and changed her outfit to a skintight peacock-blue Danskin top and a ruffled turquoise dress. After taking my measurements in a giggly stoned manner, she hopped into the stolen Porsche to head for Hollywood. She was gone until well after noon.

  I took the opportunity during her absence to look around. After all, even if she hadn't actually told me to make myself at home, I was certain that such was her intent.

  A quick glance through the medicine cabinet revealed nothing but the usual assortment of feminine colorants and perfumes. No medicine. Healthy sort.

  One room contained an odd collection of metal and crystal sculptures. Copper and onyx and silver and amethyst glittered under the light from a ceiling lamp. The curtains were drawn. Bronze and quartz and gold and peridot scattered colors about.

  Her bedroom barely enclosed a king-size bed decorated with an Egyptian motif. Lots of silk-screened papyrus leaves and scarabs. Stylized cobras. Very sexy.

  I cut my tour short since I didn't know how long she would be out. I spent the next hour waiting for her, looking through her library. Real books, not plaques. Only a few of them were fiction. A good number concerned religions around the world and in antiquity. She owned books on history, mathematics, physics. The usual computer manuals were stuck here and there. All in all, a good balance.

  Ann returned a few minutes after I'd settled onto the living-room couch. She tossed a navy blue pinstripe business suit my way.

  I held it up. A lovely wool blend, not like the reflective stuff I usually wore to merge with the crowd. It fit in with the current style-wide lapels and shoulders, baggy pants with cuffs. Nostalgia for a time even I didn't remember.

  A light yellow oxford cloth shirt and a navy-hued silk tie with nearly invisible maroon polka dots completed the outfit.

  "Tasteful," I said, draping the wardrobe over my arm.

  "Don't forget these." She pulled a pair of black wingtips out of a box and handed them to me along with a pair
of black socks.

  "Over the calf," I said with appreciation. "You know all the tricks of the trade."

  She smiled. "You didn't strike me as the baggy-socks type. And I'm the one with the garters." She pointed to the already-familiar bathroom. "Would you like a shower?"

  "I suppose I should, if we're calling on the country's top atheist."

  Theodore Golding lived in Hollywood near his Philosophical Forum on the Foundations of Theology. The Forum was located on Larchmont, right next to Thucydides, a bookstore that he also owned. He must have had money to situate his esoteric businesses near the Wilshire Country Club. I was determined not to be impressed.

  Ann pulled the Porsche up to a modest house on the four hundred block of Van Ness.

  "That's Golding's home. Feel well enough to go in?"

  With a shower and a new set of threads, I was more than ready for anything. "Bring him on. I think I can survive the experience."

  "He can help you understand god better than any preacher or shaman."

  "Certainly better than Father Beathan could."

  She smiled. "Well, don't be too sure about

  that.

  "

  Golding answered the door himself. For a man my age, he had all the exuberance of a teenager in heat.

  "You must be Ann Perrine," he said, snapping his fingers and pointing at Blondie. The finger shifted to me. "Because

  you

  don't look as if you'd sound as sexy on the phone."

  Deep blue eyes gazed sharply from beneath jet-framed glasses. The frames matched his longish hair. Dressed in a bright red silk kimono, he stood a few inches taller and about fifty pounds lighter than I did. His voice had the vague musical quality of impish good humor. I suppose he needed it in his business.

  If a man could live in a library, he might live as Golding did. Bookshelves lined every available square foot of wall space. Locked glass cases thrust out to serve as room dividers. What framed artwork he owned hung perilously here and there in front of the shelves. To top it off, in the center of it all stood a computer table sporting a library console.