“What’s this joint, Usher’s confessional?” Gojiro murmured. The place was enormous, the strange sheenlike floor at least three hundred yards across. Rocky walls vaulted up as might those of a Gothic cupola, to a ceiling lost in the shrouding darkness. The only available light came from the numerous clusters of candles, their wax dripping down upon multiarmed twenty-foot-tall holders so typical of Shig’s interior decoration. A high-pitched sound could be heard, its timbre resembling that of a massive pipe organ set on the sopranomost stop.
“Hey!” Gojiro said with a start. “What you wearing that stuff for?”
Komodo had donned an odd Saran Wrap-like see-through robe. On his head he wore a visored helmet. Shig was outfitted in a similar fashion. “These are special garments,” the pitiless boy answered. “There are high levels of certain potentially corrosive elements here.”
“Corrosive elements? What are you talking about?”
“This large cavity has been used extensively for underground nuclear testing. Right now it suits our purpose.”
“A White Light Chamber! We in a White Light Chamber?”
Komodo hung his head. “Yes. It seemed the best available shelter.”
The monster was incensed. “Shelter! How could a White Light Chamber be shelter from any storm? The Beast’s own belly—and we got to jump right in it! Auschwitz all booked up or something?”
“I am sorry for the great offense, my own true friend, but there was no alternative. I fear that the shrink ray has proved to be unfortunately unpredictable. I am afraid you can no longer be maintained at a specific height or weight. Here you can be accommodated even at your full dimensions. Please accept my apologies.”
“But what if they decide to bust one open down here?”
“My own true friend, have not the Great Powers signed a treaty forbidding such things?”
“You fall for that shit?”
Komodo sadly shook his head. “In any event, it would not happen here. This site has been abandoned for more than ten years. Shig has double-checked these facts with records secured from the Defense Department.”
“Damn.” How did Shig “secure” information like that? No doubt much intimidation and stealth was employed. The reptile looked across the huge Heater-induced ulcer and saw the whitesuited neoteen running a forklift, moving several crates around. “Now what’s he doing?”
Komodo shook his head. He didn’t know either.
* * *
Originally, the plan was just to stay the night. Until dawn. Then they would emerge, look down into the Valley. “Whatever Ms. Brooks saw happened at dawn,” Komodo told Gojiro. “ ‘Dawn light,’ that’s what she said. If we are to illuminate her secret we must attempt, inasmuch as it is possible, to see what she sees.”
The monster could only grunt. He didn’t feel like arguing the point. There was still most of a whole night left to spend in the Heater’s haunted house. “Mind if we cuddle up?” Gojiro asked Komodo. “I’m feeling a little . . . on edge.”
So they made themselves a makeshift burrow over in a corner of the abhorrent cavity, pushed themselves together, leather to skin, skin to leather. “Kind of like old times,” Gojiro said softly. Back in the Glazed Days, they always slept close, a boy snuggled within the soft hyoid of a massive lizard. It was only after Kishi arrived that they took up separate quarters. “I guess I missed this.”
“As did I, my own true friend.”
They held each other tight. Then Gojiro said, “I know this is lame and all, but I was wondering if you could read to me, you know, like you used to.”
Komodo said he would be more than happy to grant Gojiro’s request, but he had none of their favorite books.
“It don’t got to be nothing special. Could be anything, I just miss hearing you read.”
“There is only this.” It was a handout Shig had picked up at the gas station: “Prospector Pete’s Get-Rich Guide to Panning, Wildcatting, and the Semiprecious Metals of the Jornada del Muerto and Big Panghorn—Revised and Up-to-Date Edition, with Special Section on the Encrucijada.”
“Guess that’ll have to do,” Gojiro groaned.
Prospector Pete’s publication, which emanated from 23 1/2 Sospecha Street, Socorro, New Mexico, had the old-timey look of a roadside restaurant placemat, thick with rope letters and rudimentarily rendered Yosemite Sams on the cover. However, a close reading of the smudgy, rexographed pages revealed more than a few salty tales of yesteryear and hobbyist lore. Prospector Pete, who signed every item with his imprimatur of crossed pickaxes, was a polemicist of no small obsession. This was most apparent in a front page “editorial” entitled “More Double-Talk in the Encrucijada.”
“I’m sure all you have been following that big stink the Indian Nelson Monongae’s land claim is raising,” the editorial began. “Now, the ole Prospector don’t have a single thing against a Native American reclaiming what’s rightfully his. What sticks in my craw is how, ever since federalizing the land for the Bomb Test, the government has always refused to allow the independent wildcatter a fair chance on sinking a well out there on the Big Panghorn. You ask me, there’s some very serious funny business going on in the Valley.
“Let me explain myself. Probably you heard about that conference down at the state college about mass extinctions of the dinosaurs. Of course, it ain’t exactly news to us rockhounds that the so-called experts have come around to the idea that the earth was hit by an interstellar object of some type approximately sixty-six million years ago, which might have had some hand in the reptiles’ demise. What was news was a report read by a professor that there’s no place in the world with a higher concentration of iridium at the Cretaceous level than right here in the Jornada del Muerto. As any amateur geologist knows, iridium is the sure sign of celestial intervention—meteorites and so forth. All of which led these experts to conclude that this comet, or what have you, may have come to earth right here in our own backyard!
“It made a lot of sense, since any longtime sandpanner working the outskirts of the Big Panghorn doesn’t need a conference to tell him that the Jornada del Muerto has one of the widest assortments of dinosaur fossils in the world. You want triceratopses, we got ’em. Allosauruses? You name it. Well, Prospector Pete got to putting all this together back at the ole assay shack. I did a little checking and found out that the Encrucijada Valley itself—which is really no valley at all but a meteorite-type crater—has an iridium count more than one hundred times higher than the already high surrounding area. Which leads me to go out on what I feel is a very short limb and say the Encrucijada Valley is the actual site of the comet fall!
“Now hold your horses all you panners and wildcatters. Maybe you think the Prospector’s gone off the deep end with all this talk about comets and dinosaurs. I just want you to ask yourself one question: What’s fossils mean but fossil fuels????!!!!!! Let me tell you, if that comet really did hit out there in the Encrucijada, don’t that make it potentially one of the richest fields ever? And let me say one more thing: I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who ever came to this conclusion. Fellow rockhounders and roustabouts: How long are we going to let the federal government and Big Oil tell us we can’t seek our fortunes in our own backyards on account of they once shot off an Atom Bomb out there?”
When Komodo stopped reading, a shocked silence enveloped the White Light Chamber.
“Shee-it,” Gojiro finally whistled. “He saying that the saurs bought it right out there, in the Encrucijada?”
“That is what Mr. Pete seems to intimate, yes.”
The monster shook his head. “The Heater born in the same place where the saurs died . . . that’s heavy.”
“It would be a remarkable coincidence, an astounding confluence.”
Gojiro shuddered. “Talk about your fearful symmetry.”
“It is an eccentric notion to be sure,” Komodo said tentatively, rubbing his chin. “Yet . . .”
“Yet what?”
“Oh, it’s probably n
othing, but seemingly unrelated items synchronate in my mind. The first, of course, is Mr. Monongae’s contention that the Lizard Clan came to this spot because his great-great-grandfather felt ‘the blood of the world’ was here. Secondly, there is Ms. Brooks’s mother’s portrait. That X-ray pattern, it’s so . . . paleontological. Then there’s Mr. Zeber’s statement that she insisted the Trinity Bomb be exploded here and nowhere else.”
Gojiro gave Komodo a sidelong glance. “What are you getting at?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s probably silly,” Komodo sighed. “It’s just that I was recently reading a book that touched on the discipline of geomancy. The author, in an unfortunately unscientific manner, expressed the belief that there are places in the world—he referred to them as power spots—where extraordinary events seem to occur over and over again. I only mention this now because if this Valley proved to be one of these power spots, then perhaps more extraordinary events could transpire here—which gives me renewed hope in regard to our Solemn Vow.”
The monster was feeling sick now. “Hey look. This is giving me the creeps. You mind if we don’t talk about it right now?”
Komodo nodded sharply, the animation draining from his face. “Of course, we must get our rest. We must be up at dawn. Tomorrow is potentially a most consequential day.” Then Komodo extinguished the last of the candle clusters, plunging the White Light Chamber into darkness.
* * *
He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop his mind. Listening to Komodo’s quiet breathing only made it worse. For the millionth time he felt he didn’t deserve such a loyal friend. That loony riff about the Encrucijada being a power spot, whatever that meant—it just proved it all over again. Maybe Komodo was a terminal pollyanna, forever naive, but at least he was throwing his heart and soul into their sworn quest to fulfill the Triple Ring Promise. How the monster despised himself right then. So he didn’t believe for a minute that business about Sheila Brooks having a secret—wasn’t it still his duty to offer Komodo more than flaccid, reluctant assurances of support? The Triple Ring Promise was pledged between them, ostensibly of equal importance to them both. Yet as Komodo scoured the landscape for every clue, however unlikely, what did Gojiro do?
Withhold evidence.
It was worse than a lie, the reptile knew, not informing Komodo of that business with Billy Snickman on the freeway. After all, in the investigation into Sheila Brooks’s alleged secret, it seemed a significant piece of evidence. How else could she have learned of that mind-bending supplication, if not from Billy Snickman? Telling would have been so easy. When Komodo came over with that tiny gun, holding its barrel gingerly between two fingers, fingerprint-squad style, Gojiro could have said, “Yes, she was here! I know it!” He could have pointed to that wild boy right then, let Komodo listen to the mantra he spoke. It could have come out right then and there—what happened that night on Dead Letter Hill, the reason for that terrible operation, all of it. Except he didn’t say a thing. Those phrases: Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Defender of the Evolloo—they intimidated him, kept him silent.
“Shit!” He got up, paced in the joyless gloom of that White Light Chamber. What an abominable place, how huge and hideous! Some major megatoning must have been done down there to have gouged so grotesque a vacancy into the earth, the monster thought. He was flipping out! Jagged images of the past few days tumbled through the Quadcam, cascading like an all-night game of fifty-two pick-up. He saw that Indian, the Echo Man, who said his Lizard Clan owned the Valley. That vial ’round his neck—that black vial!—what was it? Then, in rapid succession, there came Albert Bullins, flying low in a Superfortress. And Bobby Zeber’s mournful smile, and Wilma, walking away from Walter’s grave, Victor Stiller with his martini; what did he want? And Sheila Brooks, of course, Sheila Brooks.
“Stop! Leave me alone!” Seeking refuge, the leviathan reached out for any tool to tamp the raging furies. Then he thought he saw it. Those boxes Shig had been pushing around—they were Dishscreens! Beat-up Philcos and Admirals, B&Ws bought from a secondhand store in Alamogordo, a bank of video sanctuary. But when he turned the screens on, every one of them got only one picture. A large, murky landscape filled each screen.
“What’s this? ‘Sunrise Semester’ for the deforested zone?” Then the monster saw those red cliffs and knew: This wasn’t regular programming. It was monitors! That’s what Shig was doing with those forklifts—setting up monitors to scan the Valley outside.
The cliffs were redder now, color slowly infusing them. Dawn! It was dawn—time to see the secret. “Hey! Wake up,” the reptile shouted as he twirled dials to clear the picture. In the incipient daylight, the redrimmed crater shone. Encrucijada was a near-perfect circle, at least five miles across, three deep. That nut bag prospector was right; it could have been caused by a foreign object, a great ball driving itself into the earth, leaving, all those eons later, a bare, somber hole.
It took a moment to realize there was a house sitting in the middle of a vast bowl. It was stone, a sprawling affair, with several additions. The roof was gray slate, the chimney was smoking. The monster gulped. Someone was home in that house!
Then Gojiro saw him, standing behind the stone fence. A man in black.
A man in black.
A tall man, a tremendously old-looking man wearing a black hat, his face obscured by the brim. Staring out, staring out.
Then it was right there. The face. It was looking out of the monitor, right into Gojiro’s face. Those eyes! Those black eyes. Searching, connecting, locking on.
“It’s Brooks! He’s alive!”
·Part Three·
Alone in Hell
THE DESERT SUN WAS EDGING ABOVE the red cliffs when Komodo walked out into the Valley. Rock gave way to sand and then to a sheet of glass, a greentinged sheen stretching for hundreds of yards in every direction. It was the Heater’s legacy, Komodo knew, the glass cracking beneath his feet like the brittle bones of a past made forever obsolete.
Up ahead, a dark ghost shimmering in the rising heat, was Joseph Prometheus Brooks. Joseph Prometheus Brooks! Komodo fixed his path toward the blackclad figure, did not waver from it.
With him, he brought only the fumetti. It was a gift, a token of esteem. “We cannot approach him empty-handed,” Komodo told Gojiro back inside the White Light Chamber. Not that the fumetti could be compared with a fountain pen, or even the key to Radioactive Island. It was just a twenty-eight-page aggregate of thick-grained snapshots festooned with bulbous dialogue balloons in the manner of an Italian comic book. Still, Komodo considered it the perfect offering. It represented Truth—at least a certain kind of Truth.
“Our real story, told by us.” That’s how Gojiro referred to the fumetti in the frenzied days immediately following the discovery of Shig’s skullduggery regarding the King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms movies. The monster’s original intention was to restage the events of their lives, from the founding of Radioactive Island to the creation of the Cosmo, up to the current scene. Bound on full disclosure, the reptile rejected Komodo’s proposal to show the story in a series of abstract drawings. “The whole Truth and nothing but,” the monster demanded, insisting on photography. “No touch or retouch.”
Gojiro’s plan was to print up a limited number of fumetti—five hundred, a thousand tops—then place them in strategic positions around the globe, one in a telephone booth on Forty-Second Street, another in a bush at the Everest tree line, a few shoved into crannies in the Great Wall, etc. Publishing millions, muscling them onto every newsstand, all that smacked of the official denial, the monster declared, the totalitarian and parental. That was no way to dislodge Shig’s narrative from the impressionable minds of G-fans. Truth could not arrive blustery and bullying and expect to be accepted; it had to creep subversive, like rumor, legend.
The scheme, however, was never executed. The 90 Series headed it off. Everything got put on the back burner after that. So there was only one fumetti in existence, the paste-up prototype
that Komodo now held in his sweating hands as he walked across the Encrucijada toward the slate-roofed house where Joseph Prometheus Brooks stood.
The fumetti would help, Komodo thought, the early morning sun already hard upon his forehead. It contained the only existing photo of the King of Monsters and Coma Boy together, a shot of the two standing on Corvair Bay Beach. Showing it to Brooks, Komodo thought, would immediately make the predicament clear. Every moment counted; the vicissitudes of the Triple Ring Promise had to be presented as quickly as possible. Mastering the rudiments of Quadcamerality, deciphering the mysteries of Reprimordialization would likely be child’s play for someone like Joseph Prometheus Brooks, Komodo surmised. But then again, who could predict the workings of genius? It operates on its own schedule, does not square with the nine to five. All he could do, Komodo thought as he made his way across the giant Valley, was to impress the urgency of the situation upon the great scientist.
He got within a hundred yards of the house before the image became clear in his mind. The way Brooks stood there, gaunt and stiff in his worn parson’s coat, his huge hands thrust out before him, palms up, spiny fingers spread as if he were cradling an invisible sphere—it was identical to the pose in Leona Brooks’s X-ray portrait. It was as if the picture had come to life, right there in the middle of the Valley of the Crossroads.
The recognition wobbled Komodo, made him weak. For a moment he thought he’d pass out, faint right there on the Heater’s greenish sheet, but he gathered himself up, pushed on.
“Mr. Brooks?” he called into the parched air. “Please forgive this oppressive intrusion. I am Yukio Komodo. If I may approach and speak to you, I will restrict my altogether insignificant questions to the barest minimum.” Brooks offered no acknowledgment of Komodo’s presence. He just kept looking, staring out into the Valley. It was just a matter of asking the perfect question, Komodo thought, bulwarking himself. If only he could frame the exact right query in the exact right way, the incisive force of the interrogatory itself would compel Brooks to reply as any great man-of-science must when confronted with a problem worthy of his mettle. But what was that question?
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