‘Mr Hillary’ slowly shook his handsome head. He gave off a sexual attraction that was almost tangible – an attraction that made the nerve-endings tingle and the hair stand up on the back of Michael’s head. Michael had never been aroused by a man before, and the idea that he might have even the slightest homosexual leanings filled him with dark disgust. But at the same time, he felt an erotic prickling between his legs, as if somebody with very sharp fingernails were delicately cupping his testicles, and stroking the tip of his penis.
He felt himself begin to rise, and he took a step away from ‘Mr Hillary’ in alarm and revulsion.
‘Mr Hillary’ said, ‘Don’t blame me, Michael. I am sin itself – every sin imaginable – but it is you who made me so. I was your scapegoat. I was the one who redeemed you. You poor, weak, confused people! Look what mischief you work, look how you whine and whinge and beg for mercy when your mischief comes home to roost!’
His eyes lingered on Michael for a moment, trawled across his face like a netful of bloodied fish, and Michael felt a shiver of cold sensuality that ran all the way down his spinal column and shrank his prostate gland. His penis was fully erect, hard to bursting, and ‘Mr Hillary’ hadn’t even touched him.
Then ‘Mr Hillary’ turned his attention to Megan. ‘This isn’t the real you, is it, Megan?’ he asked. ‘This isn’t the same you that Dr Loeffler has been trying to help?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Megan, her voice tightly constricted with fright. All the same, her face and her upper chest were flushed, and her nipples were jutting stiffly through the thin grey silk of her blouse.
‘Mr Hillary’ slyly covered his face with his hand, so that all Megan could see was his blood-red eyes, glittering behind the protective cage of his fingers. ‘The real you, Megan, is incapable of walking. The real you, Megan, is a poor paralysed scrap of a thing who has to seek fulfillment in cheerfulness, and in cakes and pies.’
He glanced back at Michael, and said, ‘You’re a good disciple, Michael. I look forward to seeing more of you.’
But then he turned to Megan again and shook his head. ‘Don’t deceive yourself, Megan. There’s far too much deceit in the world. Far too much! And the day is coming soon when all of that deceit is paid for, in full, with two thousand years of interest!’
He reached out with both hands and gripped Megan’s shoulders. Michael said, ‘Don’t touch her!’ but ‘Mr Hillary’ gave him a glare of such blood-filled ferocity that he hesitated for just an instant, and for Megan that instant was all that was needed to bring her low. Her knees buckled, and she dropped sideways onto the library floor, hitting her shoulder against a small footstool and toppling it over.
‘This is the Megan we know and love!’ smiled ‘Mr Hillary’, and knelt beside her, like a lover kneeling beside his paramour, like a supplicant kneeling beside his fallen queen. He lifted her head up in the palm of his right hand, with infinite gentleness, and kissed her lips. At the same time his left hand ran lightly down her side, barely touching her breast, barely touching her hip, barely touching her upper thigh.
Michael stumbled forward, determined to knock him down, but ‘Mr Hillary’ turned and raised his hand and simply said, ‘Stop,’ in the softest of tones; and then ‘Wake.’
‘Wake?’ Michael demanded. ‘Wake?’
‘It’s all over, Michael. Wake.’
Michael looked around him – at the library bookshelves, at the whitewashed ceiling, at ‘Mr Hillary’, in his soft grey coat, crouching over Megan handsome and evil, his hand still resting on her hip.
He heard a sound like a mirror being stressed, the instant before it breaks.
He felt the world slide from under him, faster and faster.
He saw lights, darkness, and walls rushing past him.
He heard voices and murmurs, thick and slow.
He opened his eyes and he was sitting at Megan’s dining-table, blinking in the sunlight, and Megan was sitting opposite him, her hands gripping the arms of her wheelchair. She stared at him. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open. Her cheeks were two bright spots of pink.
Michael didn’t know what to say. He had never in his life been gripped by such a feverish sexual passion. His chest rose and fell as if he had been running, and running hard.
Without a word, Megan lifted herself from her wheelchair, and slid awkwardly onto the carpet. With one hand, she pushed the wheelchair away, and with the other, she pulled up her skirt.
Michael tugged open the buttons of his shirt, unbuckled his belt, stepped out of his trousers. He was totally aware that what he was doing was wrong. He was betraying Patsy, he was betraying Giraffe. But the blood was pumping through his arteries like rainwater gushing through storm drains, and his head thundered with excitement.
Megan was crying out loud, like a wounded bird. She reached down with both hands and pulled aside her white lace panties. Her vulva was swollen and rosy, and glistening in readiness. Naked, Michael climbed on top of her, his erection held in his fist, and pushed it into her, until their pubic hair was intertwined, and he could push it in no further.
He kissed her and licked her and bit her earlobes. He pulled the buttons from her blouse, and slid his hand into the cups of her bra, and squeezed her nipples. And all the time he forced himself into her, again and again and again, the hugest and hardest and most indomitable erection that he had ever experienced. She didn’t have the use of her legs, but she had the use of her lips and the use of her fingers, and she kissed him and nipped at his lips and dragged her fingernails down his back. She pulled apart the cheeks of his bottom and teased him and scratched him and tickled him, until he knew that he couldn’t hold himself back any longer.
Megan must have sensed that, too, because she said, ‘Here!’ and took hold of his penis in her hand. She pulled him upwards – urged him upwards – until he was sitting astride her. She kissed his penis and rubbed it with her hand, harder and harder, faster and faster. Their combined lust was like two express trains, hurtling toward each other on the same track. Harder and harder, faster and faster.
Michael climaxed, a thick white pumping climax, spurt after spurt. Megan, in the strangest kind of ecstasy, directed his ejaculation all over her face – her eyelashes, her cheeks, her hair, her lips. When it was over, she looked as if she had been decorated with trembling pearls.
Michael, in that empty moment after ejaculation, bent forward and kissed her. She kissed him back, very slowly, very lasciviously, and slid her fingers into his hair.
‘You know what happened, don’t you?’ she whispered, her breath hot and thunderous in his ear.
He shook his head.
‘It was him, it was ‘Mr Hillary’, he possessed us both.’
Michael didn’t know what to say. He felt desperately guilty already. All he wanted to do was to get up from the floor and put on his pants and pretend that this had never happened. Jesus, he had been unfaithful to Patsy for the first time ever – with the disabled wife of a homicide squad detective. He couldn’t believe that he had done it. He couldn’t believe that he had wanted to do it.
He sat up. He reached over and fumbled in his trouser pocket for his handkerchief. Gently, he wiped Megan’s face; and then he kissed her again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry? You did what you felt like doing. It wasn’t love.’
‘I’m sorry because I like you. I’m sorry because you’re Thomas’s wife. I’m sorry because I’m Patsy’s husband.’
‘Will you help me back into my chair?’ she asked him.
He buttoned up her blouse, and rearranged her panties, and brushed down her skirt. Then he picked her up in his arms, and sat her back in her wheelchair.
‘It was him,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t you, and it wasn’t me. It was him. He was showing us what our sins are.’
‘I still don’t understand.’
He reached down to pick up his trousers, but Megan said, ‘No ... before you dress, come her
e.’
Naked, he approached her, and stood in front of her. She lifted her hand, and took hold of his softening penis, rubbing her thumb around the glans, and gently massaging the shaft.
‘This will never happen to me again,’ she said. ‘I’m not an adulteress; and I know that you’re not an adulterer.’ Her eyes sparkled with tears. ‘It wasn’t us, it was him, and he was sinful. But I don’t regret it. I can’t. You made me feel whole. For the first time since my accident happened, you made me feel whole.’
Michael leaned over and kissed her forehead. ‘I’d better go now. There’s a whole lot more for me to do.’
Neither of them noticed it, but a faint pinkish flicker of light passed between them, as one aura reluctantly disentangled itself from the other. What they both felt, as Michael slowly dressed himself, and combed his hair, was a distinct sense of loss, and separation.
Michael picked up the zinc-and-copper disc. He was about to slip it into his pocket, but then he put it back down on the table.
‘Souvenir,’ he said, and left, closing the door very quietly behind him.
He was manoeuvering his big green Mercury out of the sloping entrance-way in front of Thomas and Megan’s apartment when he noticed three white-faced young men in dark glasses, watching him the opposite side of the street. He stopped the car, and trod on the parking-brake.
Instantly, an Italian-looking man in a blue cotton coat came hurrying out of the building, and furiously rapped on his window. Mr Novato, the super mat Thomas loved to hate.
‘Something wrong?’ Michael asked him.
‘You can’t stop here, sir, this is a private driveway.’
‘I’m not stopped here; I’m about to leave.’
‘So, leave.’
‘I would have left by now if you hadn’t stopped me.’
The man lifted one finger, pointing upward to the apartment block. ‘You been visiting?’
‘That’s right, I’ve been visiting. I’m a friend of Lieutenant Boyle, if you must know.’
‘Well, that’s-a one sad man.’
‘Who? Who are you talking about? Lieutenant Boyle?’
‘That’s right, that’s-a one sad man.’
‘Listen, friend, you may be the super here, or whatever, but I’m not going to discuss Lieutenant Boyle’s personal feelings with you or anybody.’
‘Who wouldn’t be sad? His wife so sick. Can’t walk, can’t go shopping, can’t do nothing.’
Michael turned away, and took a deep breath. Then he turned back and said, ‘Lieutenant Boyle is very far from sad, I can tell you. And I can tell you something else: Mrs Boyle is worth a hundred of most women that I can think of.’
Mr Novato stared at him beadily. ‘Hey ... sorry I spoke. No offence meant.’
He retreated, and watched Michael back out of the sloping driveway with an angry little squeal of tyres. Before he drove off, Michael glanced back across the street, to the entrance-way where the three white-faced young men had been watching him, but now they were gone. It was quite possible that he had imagined them – especially after that Aura Hypnosis with Megan.
On the other hand, it was equally possible that they were following him, and that they intended to deal with him in the same way that they had dealt with Joe.
He drove south on Margin Street, crowded and slow, and then west on Copper. The car radio was playing ‘Happy Together’ by the Turtles. Imagine me and you, I do, I think about you day and night.
Jesus Christ, what had he done to his honour? What had he done to his marriage?
He stopped to let a man in dark glasses cross the street, thinking that he was blind. The man had almost reached the opposite kerb when he raised his dark glasses in salute, and smiled.
Marcia was hyperactive. Her face was puffy and her hair was all flat at the back. She probably hadn’t sat down once since the Barnstable County deputies had brought her the news that Joe had been discovered in the woods north of 151, stripped and assaulted, and dead of a massive cardiac arrest.
She talked as if he were still alive. She didn’t exactly say ‘when Joe gets back’ in so many words, but everything she said carried the implication that the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Department had made an ugly and painful mistake, and that when Joe did get back, well, heads would probably roll.
Michael sat in the living-room with a cup of cappuccino that he didn’t want to drink, while Marcia stalked from room to room, talking, arguing, protesting. She had only to stop for a minute and she would have to accept the fact that Joe was dead, and she wasn’t ready to do that yet. It was hard enough for Michael to accept it. There were photographs of Joe everywhere he looked. On top of the television, on top of the fireplace. Even when he used the bathroom, there was a photograph of Joe in a yellow wet-suit, lifting up a spider-crab for him to admire.
‘I told him not to get involved,’ said Marcia.
‘You told him not to get involved in what?’
‘This conspiracy business. He didn’t talk about it much, but I could tell that he was worried.’
‘What did he tell you about it?’
Marcia shook her head. ‘Hardly anything. Nothing. He said it was safer if I didn’t know. I tried to persuade him to forget about it. I’ll bet you that none of it’s true, that’s what I told him. But even if it isn’t, you’ll still get people coming after you, because they’re worried that it might be true, so leave well enough alone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’
Marcia stopped pacing for a moment, and then she said, ‘He didn’t leave you anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘There’s an envelope, but that’s all.’
‘An envelope? Do you mind if I see it?’
‘Oh ... sure.’ Marcia disappeared into the room that Joe had used as a den, and then reappeared two or three minutes later with a thick legal-sized envelope. On the front, in Joe’s writing, were the words For Michael Rearden. Only To Be Opened In The Event Of My Sudden Death.
Michael tore open the envelope and took out the letter. ‘This is dated two years ago,’ he said, in surprise.
‘That was when Joe first came up with this conspiracy theory,’ said Marcia. ‘Ever since then, life has been very much less harmonious. God – I wish he’d been a streetsweeper, or a school janitor, or an auto mechanic. Why didn’t he stick to ordinary, run-of-the-mill insurance investigations? Why did he think that he was going to change the world?’
Michael closed his ears to Marcia Garboden for a moment. He knew how she felt, but she wasn’t helping any. Besides, he was trying to make sense of the contents of the letter that Joe had left him. There was a sheet of notepaper, bearing nothing but a typewritten series of names and numbers, with no explanatory notes whatsoever; and then there were twenty or thirty photocopies of engravings and photographs, mostly photographs.
The names and numbers were: ‘Lincoln 65 Alexander 81 Garfield 81 Umberto 00 McKinley 01 Madero 13 George 13 Ferdinand 14 Michael 18 Nicholas 18 Carranza 20 Collins 22 Villa 23 Obregon 28 Cermak 33 Dollfuss 34 Long 35 Bronstein 40 Gandhi 48 Bernadotte 48 Hussein 51 Somoza 56 Armas 57 FaisaL 58 as-Said 58 Bandaranaike 59 Lumumba 61 Molina 61 Evers 63 Diem 63 Mansour 65 X 65 Verwoerd 66 King 68 Tal 71 NoeL 73 Park 74 Davies 74 Ratsimandrava 75 Faisal 75 Rahman 75 Ramat Moham-med 76 Jumblat 77 Ngoubai 77 Al-Naif 78 Dubs 79 Neave 79 Mountbatten 79 Park 79 Tolbert 80 Debayle 80 Ali Raji 81 El-Sadat 81 Gemayel 82 Sartawi 83 Aquino 83 Gandhi 84 ... ‘
It took him a minute or two, but gradually Michael began to understand what the letter was trying to tell him. Every name was the name of an assassinated politician or dignitary or head of state, and the numbers signified the years in which they had been killed.
Then he looked through the photographs. Every one of them was a photograph of the assassination or the funeral of one of the people on the list, or the execution of their assassins. In every one of them, two or three white-faced bystanders had
been circled by Joe in red felt-tip pen.
Here was the hanging on July 7, 1865, of John Wilkes Booth’s accomplices, after the assassination of Lincoln. Mrs Mary Surratt, David Herrold, Lewis Paine and George Atzerodt hung from the scaffold, their heads covered in sacks, their legs tied together to prevent them from kicking. And there, shielding themselves from the sunlight under large umbrellas, were two of the white-faced men, wearing tiny smoked spectacles, both smiling.
Here was Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President Garfield at the Washington railroad station, arriving handcuffed for his trial on November 14, 1881 – with three white-faced men standing in the crowd, just behind his left shoulder.
Here was the shooting of Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat on October 6, 1981, at a military parade in Cairo. Most of the spectators were hiding under their seats – but a single white-faced man is watching President El-Sadat’s shooting from the far left of the picture, with a faint smile on his face.
Michael asked, ‘May I?’ and spread out the pictures on Marcia’s dining-table. He looked from one to the other – and although they varied in quality, and some of them had obviously been computer-enhanced, there was no question at all that the same men appeared again and again, unchanged in appearance, from Lincoln’s shooting at Ford’s Theater in Washington to the killing of Rajiv Gandhi at a political rally in southern India – over 125 years between them. With nothing but names and dates and identifying circles, Joe was giving Michael incontrovertible proof that the white-faced men had been assassinating politicians and heads of state for year after year – regardless of their political points of view.
Some victims were right-wing extremists. Others were left-wing terrorists. There was no political rhyme or reason behind their killing. But Joe was explaining that John F. Kennedy hadn’t been the only victim of the white-faced men. They had arranged for all of these assassinations.
Michael stood back and stared at the pictures, so deep in thought that he didn’t even hear Marcia when she asked him if he wanted a drink.
What the hell was he going to do now? There was no question at all that the white-faced men would come after him, if they found out what he knew – the same way that they had gone after Joe, and Dr Rice, and maybe everybody throughout history who had witnessed one of their assassinations, or who had put two and two together, like Joe, and realized that the same pallid faces kept appearing about a hundred times too often to be coincidental.
The Sleepless Page 35