Jonathan shook his head. I looked at him carefully, and for a second I thought I could detect an expression in his eyes that wasn’t anything to do with being six years old and sick in bed. It was too cold, too strong, and too knowing. But it vanished before I could respond to it, and then all I could do was wave Jonathan a daddy-like wave and ask him if he wanted any comics, or any toys.
‘I’d just like my Evel Knievel bike, please,’ he said, solemnly.
Dr Rosen smiled at me. ‘That’s what I call a quick recovery. You’re a lucky parent, Mr Delatolla.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think, just for once, the angels were on our side.’
Throughout the night, Jonathan’s condition continued to improve. I went in to see him once or twice, and we talked for a few minutes, but I didn’t see any more of those celestial flashes of brilliant light, and I didn’t hear any more of those resounding voices. All the same, I had the feeling that I had been told everything I needed to know, and that in some inexplicable way we were ready.
Towards dawn, I curled up and went to sleep for a while on the waiting-room couch. I had a vivid dream about flying… about twisting and turning through the sky… and all the while the sun was dramatically rising from behind the clouds, throwing out shafts of golden light...
I was woken up by Sara bringing me a cup of coffee and a bagel. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were sleeping. I thought you might feel like some breakfast.’
I sat up, and smeared my face back into shape with my hands. ‘What time is it?’ I asked her.
‘Seven-thirty.’
‘Have you been in to see Jonathan?’
She nodded. ‘He’s sleeping. Dr Rosen says he’s going to be fine.’
I took a sip of scalding black coffee from the styrofoam cup. ‘That’s good. Although I think we owe more to God than we do to Dr Rosen.’
‘You’re sounding very religious all of a sudden.’
‘That’s because everything that’s happened this week has been connected with religion, one way or another. Or at least it’s been connected with the historical struggle between Absolute Good and Absolute Evil.’
Sara made a face. ‘You’re being indecently philosophical first thing in the morning. Usually you do nothing but grunt.’
‘This morning, I don’t have time to grunt.’
‘Because of David?’
I buttered my bagel with the bendy plastic knife that Sara had brought me. ‘He’s going to launch that missile at ten o’clock. That’s what Martin Jessop said on the phone. And that means we have to work out what we’re going to do about it, and how we’re going to get Jonathan out of this hospital, all in two hours flat.’
‘What?’ Sara asked me.
‘Listen,’ I told her, ‘you remember yesterday, in Jonathan’s room, how I told you I heard someone talking.’
‘Yes. But what of it?’
‘I heard more than just one sentence. Jonathan – or rather someone who was speaking through Jonathan – gave me a whole explanation of what had happened.’
Sara looked at me as if I’d lost a wingnut. ‘Ricky,’ she said, ‘it’s just the strain.’
‘I know what’s strain and what’s real, honey, and that wasn’t strain.’
‘But I didn’t hear anything. How come I didn’t hear anything?’
‘I don’t know. You didn’t hear the chair either, did you? Maybe a talent for hearing occult voices runs in my family. Maybe they’re like dog-whistles, that some people can hear and other people can’t.’
‘Maybe your family’s crazy.’
I blew out my cheeks. ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe we are. But this morning, over a hundred people are going to lose their lives unless I try to do something about it. And I’d rather you told me I was crazy after I’d tried, than before. I have to try.’
‘And that means taking Jonathan out of hospital? Why?’
‘Because Jonathan is the only one who can stop what’s going to happen today.’
‘Your voices told you that?’
‘My voices, as you call them, said quite specifically that Jonathan was one of God’s children… that he was innocent… and that the Devil was powerless to hurt him.’
‘How can that be?’ asked Sara. ‘He got cut in the face, didn’t he? And he went into a coma?’
‘Whatever the chair tried to suggest, he was held in that coma by some kind of agency of God, not of the Devil. It was done to protect him, to keep him out of the Devil’s reach. Leastways, that’s what I understood the voice to be saying.’
‘Ricky, this is insane. We can’t drag Jonathan out of hospital for the sake of some imaginary angels.’
‘We’re going to have to. You want all those people to die?’
‘No, I don’t. But I don’t want Jonathan to die, either. And if you start using him to prove some crackpot theory about Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and God’s children, and who knows what else, then he may. Didn’t David say that Martin Jessop would “deal” with us if we got in his way? Well, that’s another danger, quite apart from the chair, and I won’t have either you or Jonathan being exposed to it.’
‘Sara,’ I said, ‘it’s worse than just mass murder. If the Devil’s been promised the souls of all those dead people at the convention centre…then He could have sufficient strength to be brought back to earth again. You know what it said in your college textbook.’
Sara stood up. ‘I know what it said in my college textbook. It said that all that stuff was nothing more than a Renaissance legend.’
‘So you’re telling me that you don’t believe me, and that you won’t help?’ I asked her.
‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. I’m quite sure you did hear those voices. But, Ricky, we’ve had a terrible week. They could easily have been inside of your head, and nowhere else.’
I picked up my cup of coffee and then put it down again. ‘Sara,’ I said quietly, ‘I’m asking for your support. Do you understand me? I know that I’m right, and whatever you think about it, I’m asking for your support. For once, please, just blindly and unquestioningly do what I say. Because right now, there’s no time to argue.’
Sara came over and sat down beside me. She brushed at my tousled hair with her fingers. ‘Do you really believe you heard angels?’ she asked me.
‘Angels, voices, I don’t know. If they’re calling the Devil a Black Hole these days, maybe the angels are Quasars. But I heard them all right, and they told me over and over again that Jonathan could not be hurt… or at least, he certainly couldn’t be killed.’
‘How do you know you weren’t hearing another voice from the Devil? You could have done, you know. He may be trying to outwit you – to take your life and Jonathan’s life as well as all the others.’
I lowered my eyes. ‘I’ve thought about that. But I think it’s a risk we’re just going to have to run.’
Sara took my hand. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll support you. It’s against my own judgement, and against my own instincts, but if you say you truly believe it, then I’ll support you. And there won’t be any recriminations afterwards, either, even if it goes wrong. I know when you’re really serious about something and when you’re not.’
I leaned over and kissed her. ‘I think we may save some lives today,’ I told her.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s wait and see.’
10
Sunderings
It was a quarter after nine before we were able to leave the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy and drive out on to the northbound freeway. There was a thick ocean fog around, and everybody was driving with their headlights on, so that the landscape appeared to be that of some grey and spectral graveyard, alive with mysterious lamps. I thought of the dark outline of the minotaur, and The Mystery Guest At The Funeral.
Jonathan sat in the back of the wagon, dressed in navy-blue dungarees and a white crew-neck sweater. His knees were wrapped in a chequered travelling-blanket, and he was holding a pap
er bag of medicines on his lap. Dr Rosen had shouted at us all the way down one corridor and all the way up the next, trying to stop us from taking Jonathan away. But we were paying the bills, not Dr Rosen, and in the end he had given up – slamming the discharge papers down on the counter and watching us while we signed them with the veins standing out at the side of his neck.
‘Caring parents, huh?’ he had said, sarcastically. ‘Adolf Hitler was a more caring parent. Attila the Hun was a more caring parent.’
He had treated Jonathan so well that I had hated to argue with him. But. he hadn’t been in any kind of mood to listen to excuses or flattery or anything at all, so I had simply left him standing where he was, snorting as hard as a weekend jogger, and growling to himself about fascists.
Even Sara had to admit, though, that Jonathan was in far better shape than anybody had a right to expect of a boy who had been lying in a coma for four days. This morning he was bright and perky, and he chattered all the way out of San Diego and along to Rancho Santa Fe. The cut on his cheek had almost disappeared, and he didn’t have to wear anything more than a Band-Aid.
‘Are we going back to the house?’ he asked, as we drove around the curves of Lomas Santa Fe Road.
‘Not right away,’ I said, straightforwardly. ‘We just have a, quick visit to make to somebody in Escondido.’
‘You mean the Leinmanns?’
‘No, not exactly.’
‘Then who?’
‘You’ll see when we get there.’
As we came nearer to Rancho Santa Fe, we passed the precipice where I had pushed Father Corso’s Volkswagen. The blackened wreck had been taken away now, but the bushes were still scorched, and there was a black oily mark on the ground. I was probably doing nothing more than frightening myself, but that oily mark seemed to bear a haunting resemblance to the shape of the beast.
We sped past the entrance to our own driveway, and then right on to the village itself. Jonathan was singing the theme from Star Wars in a high-pitched voice. Pretty appropriate, I thought. And as I turned on to the Escondido road I prayed to God that what I had heard from those voices last night was true, and that there really was some force of purity that would protect us from the evil of the Devil’s chair. Sara reached across the car and momentarily touched the back of my hand.
It was almost ten o’clock by the time we reached the small turn-off that led up to the Jessop house. The morning fog hadn’t lifted yet, although outside of the wagon the atmosphere was uncomfortably humid. I drove up to the gates, and applied the Impala’s handbrake.
‘Do you think they’re going to let you in, just like that?’ asked Sara.
‘I have a plan,’ I told her. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for most of the night.’
I reached, out of the window and pressed the intercom button on the gatepost. There was a pause, and a crackle, and then the Mexican manservant said, ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Mr Delatolla. I was round here the other night with Mr Sears.’
‘You have an appointment?’
‘No, but I must talk urgently with Mr Martin Jessop.’
‘Mr Martin Jessop is not at home.’
‘Don’t give me that. I know for a fact that he’s here. He told me he would be. Now, go tell him I have to speak to him.’
Another crackle. Then, ‘Wait a moment.’
Sara raised her eyebrows questioningly. I shrugged. All I was counting on now was Martin Jessop’s fear that his scheme to save his life wasn’t going to work out exactly the way he’d intended it to. I switched on the news station on the radio, in case there were any bulletins about the religious convention in Los Angeles.
At last, the same voice that I’d heard on the telephone in David’s apartment down at Presidio Place said, ‘Yes? This is Martin Jessop.’
‘Mr Jessop? I’m Ricky Delatolla.’
‘I’ve heard all about you, Mr Delatolla. I’m pleased that you came around to my way of thinking. But is anything wrong? My manservant said you wanted to talk to me pronto.’
I grabbed a map from the glove compartment, and rustled it loudly in front of the intercom. ‘It’s this runic contract,’ I said. ‘I had the runes checked over last night by a classics professor at San Diego U., and he’s worried that we may all have been tricked.’
‘Tricked? In what way?’
‘Well, it seems as if we have to insist that the chair adds a clause that binds it to fulfil its contract even if the body-count in Los Angeles is lower than a certain figure; or if we have to postpone the missile-firing until tomorrow; or cancel it altogether.’
‘Unh?’
‘It’s kind of hard to explain through an intercom,’ I said.
‘Okay, then. You’d better come on in. But make it quick. We’re due to launch in ten minutes or so.’
‘I’ll hurry, Mr Jessop. Don’t you worry about that.’
The gates creaked apart, and we drove into the grounds of the Jessop mansion with the feeling that we were voluntarily entering the gates of Purgatory. The trees stood silent in the mist like petrified souls, and when we turned the comer of the uphill driveway, the vast Gothic mansion loomed over us with its spires and balconies and turrets, and I couldn’t suppress a shiver.
‘Someone walk over your grave?’ asked Sara.
Martin Jessop was waiting for us on the steps. He was a tall, well-built young man in his mid-thirties, with all the tensile strength and obvious arrogance that his father must once have possessed. He had the same square-cut face, the same starey eyes, the same abrupt nose. His hair was carefully quiffed in a style that reminded me of the Everley Brothers, and he wore an expensive old-fashioned suit with wide lapels. A little way behind him, immaculate as always, stood David Sears.
‘Mr Delatolla?’ said Martin Jessop. He shook my hand as forcefully as if he were adjusting my wrist with a nickel-plated wrench. ‘I hope we can sort this difficulty out without any kind of delay.’
‘This is my family here,’ I told him. ‘My wife Sara, and my son Jonathan.’
‘I’m glad to see that Jonathan’s recovered,’ called David, in his crispest accents. I ignored him. I didn’t want to lose my cool, and if I started talking to David, I knew that I would.
‘You have the contract with you?’ asked Martin Jessop.
I patted my coat as if the contract were in my inside pocket. In fact, I’d left it in the hospital safe for security. It was too important to all of our lives for me to risk it being snatched, or destroyed, or defaced. And, who knows, the chair may have tried to take it back.
‘I’d rather discuss this someplace less open,’ I said. ‘That’s if you don’t mind.’
‘Well, not at all,’ said Martin Jessop. ‘Why don’t you come round to the back of the house? You can see the missile for yourself then.’
We all walked across the mossy flagstones that edged the house, until we reached a wide patio at the back. The patio was decorated with stone urns and a sundial, but today the pride of place was given to the chair. It stood in the centre of a star-shaped pattern of coloured bricks, and it was even taller and more ominous in its appearance than ever. It must have been at least eight feet high. And it was resonating with a deep, almost inaudible bass note – a note that reverberated through the stonework, and even through the ground we walked on.
‘It’s that chair,’ said Jonathan, alarmed, and came up close to me and held my hand.
‘Don’t you get frightened now,’ I told him, and ruffled his hair. ‘You and me, we’re a whole lot tougher than any old chair, aren’t we?’
Martin Jessop gave me a slanted, uneasy smile. David kept his distance, his hands clasped behind his back, trying to appear both remote and interested at the same time.
Further away, at the foot of the long downhill slope of the garden, where the front driveway curved around the house and made its way to a row of stables and carriage-houses, the missile-carrier was parked. I don’t think that I’d ever seen one that close before, and it was very
much smaller and neater but very much more business-like than I’d imagined.
The launcher was a ten-wheeled trailer, hauled by a Kenworth Transorient truck. It’s firing-ramp was already raised on two shining hydraulic pistons, so that the nose of the missile was pointing up over the trees that surrounded the Jessop estate. The missile itself was painted white, with two stubby wings and a tailfin. It wasn’t much longer than a family car. On one side, it bore the letters USAF, Jessop Aerospace Industries. Three engineers in blue overalls were crouched on the launcher beside it, making last-minute checks.
‘There it is,’ said Martin Jessop, unnecessarily. ‘The instrument of our salvation.’
‘It’s so small,’ said Sara.
‘Oh yes, ma’am, it’s small,’ said Martin Jessop. ‘But that’s micro-engineering for you. In fact, it’s forty-five inches longer than the Boeing cruise missile, but it has to carry extra payload, seeing as how it has to lift off the ground by itself.’
‘How long will it take to get to Los Angeles?’ I asked.
‘Only a few minutes,’ Martin Jessop assured me. ‘It cruises at Mach 0.72 which is nearly three-quarters the speed of sound. This is the tactical version, which we guide into the air from our IBM computer right here. In mid-course, it flies by a Lear Siegler strapdown platform and a TI active radar seeker.’
‘I’m afraid that’s all Greek to me,’ said Sara.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Martin Jessop. ‘I guess I spend too many hours of my life talking to aero-engineers. But you can take it that this missile is extremely accurate. In its strategic version, which has a range of fifteen hundred miles, we can guarantee to hit a target no more than one hundred and twenty feet in diameter. We call that CEP – circular error probability. That’s with Tercom guidance, of course.’
‘Oh, of course,’ I nodded.
‘I think we ought to get on,’ said David, loudly. ‘The convention opened at nine-thirty. The centre should be pretty crowded by now.’
I glanced back at the house. ‘Does your father know what’s going on here?’ I asked Martin Jessop.
Martin Jessop stared at me for a moment. He had a slight nervous tic over his right eye. ‘My father knows we’re carrying out a test fire, of course. I expect he’s watching from his study window.’
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