One of the prongs on the Atmosphere suddenly widened, its end stretching open like a tiny mouth, a nozzle. It gently embraced the tip of his index finger, like a tiny mouth suckling a nipple. Harry's heart slammed against his ribs at this sudden engagement and he again became erect.
As if the Atmosphere had somehow noticed this, a second prong protracted from its surface, reaching down to his penis.
The pounding force of his heart reached the music in his ears and instantly a unique feeling surged to all points in his body like bolts of lightning: fear, pleasure, lethargy, pain, hunger, all intertwined, collectively tempting his mind at one intense moment. Harry shivered with joy. Yes, it was time.
The Atmosphere. It was going to reveal its true purpose to him.
The entire surface of the object began to pulse in his grip, like a heart freshly ripped from a body. It sweated a warm jelly-like substance that lubricated Harry's delirious hands-on orgy with the growing black tubes. A faint light ignited from the heart of its body, and then it splayed out an incredible array of tints that danced gleefully over his hands like a blanket of fireflies. The flesh of his arms and hands turned lucid and he could see his veins and nerve endings glowing beneath his skin. Quickly and abruptly, the elongating tendrils ensconcing his finger and penis shifted into flat shapeless forms. They swallowed the glowing ambience that irradiated his hands, and the light, that mesmerizing firefly light, was gone.
In its place: a pitch-black shadow.
And then there was pain.
The ecstatic entrancement that had held Harry for so long quickly gave way to a blinding agony of sharp light. The hammering in his head turned pleasure into pain, doubling, tripling, and then his lucidity returned to acquaint him with the harsh real world where he was simply Harry Porter, head cook at Frankie's all night diner.
Naked, bloody, filthy and quite confused Harry Porter.
The tube swallowing his penis stretched wide and ensconced his testicles like a hungry snake. Agonized, Harry fought back, trying to rip himself from the grasp of the alien object—the frothing amorphous lump of tar that was spreading over his wrists and groin like an oil slick on a rushing tide.
Grape-sized lumps swelled up on the surface of the growing object, each one pulsating with an apparent life of its own. It slithered over his forearms to his biceps, webbing across his lap like a blanket. Phosphorescent patches of purple and green glowed atop its gelatinous cover as if those fireflies had been trapped beneath its surface. It seemed enraged, or ravenous, or simply savage, but regardless it grew larger and larger and convulsively thrust itself around his torso with alarming will.
Harry finally found the wits to cry out, but his plea was short lived, and he realized with great horror as he lost his voice and breath that the thing had ripped through his chest and filled the branches of his lungs.
The final sensation twenty-one year old head cook Harry Porter felt was darkness. Complete and utter darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Six
New York City's streets held a throng of Saturday Morning enthusiasts in its hands. Instead of men in business attire and women in heels pacing the sidewalks with briefcases looped over their shoulders, joggers bounced along in nylon windsuits, bicyclists zoomed by, and nearby residents walked their dogs, leashes in one hand, plastic bags in the other to scoop up after them. The tumultuous activity of weekday rush-hour had given way to a more relaxed weekend environment. Hector piloted the cruiser through it all as Gloria Rodriguez's breakfast settled in their stomachs.
"It says here that Sanskrit spent a total of seventeen days as a Harbinger, and had harvested five Suppliers before escaping the mothership," Frank read from one of the three remaining essays Hector printed out this morning. "But it still doesn't say anywhere what their reasons were."
"Whose reasons?"
Frank grinned. "The aliens." He'd spent their entire ride to Strong Memorial reading the rest of Sanskrit's essays, for one: trying to discover any additional similarities to their investigation, and two: to distract himself from the truth about Carrie Lindsay. He had relayed the story Lindsay's father told him as they left the house, and Hector had been clearly shocked, realizing now that they would have to approach the coroner at the Medical Center after they saw Sam Richards about Harold Gross.
"Frank, enough about aliens. Lets spend our energy getting to the real heart of the matter."
"I know, I know, I'm just trying to make some sense out of this," he said shaking the papers in his hand. "The whole alien theory, as wild as it seems, it's the only thing that pieces the entire puzzle together."
"Like it did at Roswell, right? Except the only thing we don't have is a weather balloon. Remember what Martin said. If it seems too obvious, then it probably is. And nothing holds more truth right now. We're just missing something, a simple link that will explain everything. In the meantime, don't jump to any far-out conclusions."
Hector made a right turn into Strong Medical's parking garage and parked in one of three available spots reserved for doctors. They nodded to the garage attendant who frowned back, and entered the hospital through the ground floor employee entrance.
The hospital was as busy as ever, and even when the city found a few moments to nap in the early morning hours, Strong Memorial never managed to rest. Nurses and medics scurried back and forth, clipboards in hand, stethoscopes dangling like jewelry from their necks. A number of bed carts were stationed in the hall, various non-crucial emergency patients awaiting their turns for relief. A few nurses gossiped behind a circular desk which Frank and Hector approached.
The nurses pretended them invisible until Hector cleared his throat.
A middle-aged aide with reading glasses perched at the end of her nose peered over her frames at them, the chain attached swaying on both sides like two tiny bridge suspensions. She said nothing.
"We're here to see Doctor Richards. He's expecting us." He added the latter just as the nurse moved her lips to ask. She nodded and paged him, and Sam Richards appeared moments later through a pair of swinging doors with the word emergency painted on them.
"Hector, glad you could come by. I've got a heck of a schedule this afternoon, and we have lots to talk about." Sam Richards had worked in conjunction with the police department for over ten years, and along with a few other doctors at Strong, his work was exclusively about criminals who required psychiatric evaluation.
"A lot to talk about—what did you find out about Gross?"
Sam pushed through the swinging doors from where he emerged and led Frank and Hector down a long hall, his white smock billowing slightly behind him. Frank always felt queasy when visiting hospitals, today being no exception. A combination of the institutionalized whiteness, sterilized odors, and the thought of all those germs floating through the air spurred discomforting images of sickness. Images he wanted no association with unless he required treatment himself.
"Where did you find this guy, Hector?" Richards looked at Frank but no introduction was made. He had dark circles beneath his puffy eyes. He looked as tired as Hector.
"Police business."
Richards grinned, rolled his eyes. "As usual." He made a left, pushed through another set of doors and paced down a set of stairs to the basement. They walked to the end of the hallway where a security door closed them out from the psychiatric ward. Richards utilized a keycard from his smock pocket to gain entrance. The door buzzed, and the three of them went in.
The inside of the psychiatric ward had a different air about it than the rest of the hospital. Quieter, yet more foreboding. Like evil under leash.
"We've still got your boy under heavy sedation. When they brought him, he was out cold. Bloodied and out. He came around while some nurses were bandaging his wounds. All hell broke loose. It took three security guards to hold him down until they managed to get him sedated. He's been out since, but it was a helluva scene. The maniac tried to kill himself, grabbed a pair of fallen pincers and jammed it into his eye."
&
nbsp; Richards stopped in front of a closed door and slid open a small view window at eye level. Frank peeked in and saw a man lying on a steel cart, ankles and wrists bound tightly, bandages shrouding his entire face, patchlets of blood seeping through. "That Gross?"
"Yep."
"So what's wrong with him?" Frank asked, pulling away, allowing Hector to view the madman.
Richards retrieved a chart from a small box attached to the wall outside Gross' room and handed it to Frank. "After Gross' sedation, I did a routine check of motor functions, pupillary response, then had a general brain wave test to check for abnormalities. And we found some too. Quite alarming, in fact. He had no reflex response, his pupils, which were completely dilated, remained open and non-responsive to light. Then when the scans came back, I couldn't believe what I was seeing."
He pointed to the scan of Harold's brain, which to Frank looked like an ink-blot test used for psychiatric evaluation. "Here in this area," Richards said pointing to a white patch with his pen, "is the temporal lobe, or pleasure center of the brain. According to this readout, this area alone is in a high flux of DELTA, which means that this man should be not only sleeping, but should be in a high state of swoon. Another thing—all types of brainwaves, when activated, affect more than just one part of the brain, not just one isolated region as it does here in the pleasure center."
"So what's that mean?" Frank asked.
"It means our boy is a walking orgasm, to put it bluntly. To him, nothing felt bad, only good. No matter the situation, it felt like sex. The knife in the eye? Orgasm."
"But why'd he try to kill himself?"
"That's something else altogether." Richards took the scan back from Frank and returned it to the folder. "Someone placed a suggestion in his mind, and I think it's empowering him to take such harsh actions."
Hector leaned against the wall, arms folded. "Are you saying he's under hypnosis?"
Richards nodded. "Yes, and a very powerful form too, one that's got complete control of the pleasure center in his brain. I've never seen anything like it, and given the presence of THETA waves, I could safely guess that it's been mechanically induced. This is pretty sophisticated stuff we're dealing with here. And I can't get him out of it either, at least right now. After he stabilizes, blood pressure, heart rate, we'll be able to send some mild electric shocks into his brain with electrodes. That should disable the activity going on in there, and give him his own will back."
"Sounds like he's someone's zombie," Frank remarked.
"Could very well be. And if indeed that's what he was being used for, well, that would be just amazing. It's a wicked form of mind control, at its very best. Scary in the hands of the wrong person."
Frank's three personalities all agreed on that one, and at once they all played catch with different theories; most agreeably now, the cult theory. It sort of made sense now, that perhaps a Marshall Applewhite-type leader was out there, a man who possessed the ability to control the minds of his subjects, only to have them carry out the mischievous deeds formulating the dogmas of his religious beliefs. Maybe this internet guru Sanskrit had never escaped the clutches of the cult after all? Could it be then that his chatterings were merely post hypnotic suggestions to cover up the true reality of the cults wrongdoings? Or maybe they were simply preordained diversions? Regardless, it seemed most likely now that this whole big mess was indeed the result of some hypnotic, alien-worshipping murderous cult.
That still leaves some things unexplained Frank's detective mind pointed out. Like the tunneling holes in the ground. Big question mark there...
"Frank?"
Again Frank had to rip his attention away from his deliberation. "Yeah, Hect."
"You said you wanted to see the coroner?"
Frank turned from Hector and saw Richards standing there, looking a bit rushed. "Yes, of course. Are we done here?"
"I think so," Hector said. "Not much more we can do until Sam hits Harold with some juice. In the meantime we ought to go see what our coroner has to say for himself. What was his name?"
At first Frank's mind went blank. It had been some weeks now since the autopsy had been completed, and he couldn't remember the man's name. Then it came to him. "Latchman, or something like that. Dr. Latchman."
"Uh-oh." Richards pointed his gaze away for a moment, and Frank saw that something was wrong. "Dr. Rene Lacheman. He resigned. Retired actually. Said he was taking his family back to Canada."
"Damn!" Frank felt an empty sickness in the pit of his stomach, as if he had just lost his girlfriend to his best friend. "Did he say anything about coming into money?"
Richards shook his head. "Don't know, can't say for sure. But it was strange the way he just picked up and left. No notice, no goodbyes. Just picked up and disappeared. Heck, the guy worked here for fifteen years."
Frank and Hector locked gazes. Sickened gazes.
Jo-Beth Lindsay paid off the coroner.
All of a sudden Hector's radio pager squelched. He plucked it from his belt and answered. He nodded once, then yelled, "Where?", eyes suddenly bulging. When he finished, he quickly re-pocketed the radio and looked at Frank.
"Another castrated kid was found. In the Bronx."
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was déjà vu all over again. First, the cold foreboding ambience that had assumed control of her environment when she had finally escaped the subway and found herself stumbling home, barefoot, her instincts guiding her the entire way. Then, from her dreams, the illusionary worlds within her head: endless seas of faceless people passing by her, each and every one of them ignoring her true existence and brushing her away with quick passes and cold shoulders. She remembered crying out in those dreams, her pleas going unanswered. She remembered spinning in crazy circles at the crux of the detached masses, seeking just a moment's worth of stability, feeling much like an unseen spirit trapped in an alien world filled only with transient pedestrians on route to nowhere, their primary motivation to ignore her very existence.
Here in this foreign place she encountered these same feelings. They surrounded her as they had in her reverie and she considered herself to be dreaming again, but in this scenario her pain seemed all too real, and although all conditions seemed so much a fantasy in every aspect, she forced the assumption of reality upon herself as nothing in her life of late really seemed at all convincing.
She had successfully feigned her swoon as the bald guy—she had not yet come to the conclusion as to whether this was the same bald guy from her class that had pursued her into the subway—spoke to the other voice, that deep almost otherworldly voice whose source she had judiciously decided not to investigate. Peeking through squinting eyes, she waited until he was at a distance before breaking for the door that had somehow materialized in the wall. Of course his footsteps quickly approached behind her, but luckily a maze of hallways appeared and she snuck her way through them, hoping that they would soon guide her through an exit from this mysterious, dark place.
She eventually found an exit, but instead of leading her to the familiar outside world, she found herself at the threshold of a large round room, its deep dark diameter perhaps a full hundred yards. Inside were a multitude of bald men, donned in black clothing, all wearing sunglasses. They either ignored her or seemed not to see her as they worked feverishly on some type of project. Around the circumference of the room, a number of the workers were constructing platforms of some fashion, each about four feet high, only a foot or so wide. Above ran a series of catwalks where the men had hoisted small box-like fixtures, each containing a single surface constructed of glass or plastic. In one corner of the room a small structure sat quietly like a waiting animal, its walls made of glass, a series of dials and controls visible inside.
She gingerly paced forward, surrounded by her enemy, glancing nervously about. Never had fear and trepidation consumed her like it did now, and if not for the experience in her dream, she knew she would not have had the fortitude or nerve to undertake such
a task. And remarkably enough, like the people in her dream, they left her untouched, continuing on with their project as if she had not existed, as if she were a ghost unseen by those in the tangible world. She peered up at the squarish fixtures above. A flickering danced from the glassy surface of one. Lights? Then another flashed, and it seemed that indeed these were some kind of light fixtures. She took her time, pacing over to the small structure with the control panels inside. Here tiny lights flashed on a rack of what appeared at first glance to be stereo equipment: equalizers, CD players, power amps. Did this make sense? She looked from her position over to the platforms again. They looked like...bars. Was she in a nightclub of some sort? If so, then who were these bald men?
Confusion swirled around her like a great tornado, her thoughts muddled by fear. What in God's name was all this?
Suddenly a hand came down on her shoulder. She spun, heart reaching for her throat. It was him, the bald guy who brought her here.
He smiled. "I'm different than the rest of these guys," he said, pointing. "Recognize failure." He then removed his sunglasses and laughed, and Jaimie recognized his face. She'd seen it a dozen times before in the newspaper.
Bobby Lindsay.
Once again, Jaimie fainted, this time right in the arms of Bobby Lindsay.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jesus peeked over the edge of the dumpster and saw the mutilated body. He then stepped down and gazed at the blood splattered on the brick wall.
No matter, as long as he would be able to keep this wonderfully strange object, the one he found minutes earlier on the alley floor.
Earlier, he couldn't fathom a reason as to why he had been magically drawn to the alley, but when he arrived here he knew, oh yes he knew unequivocally it was this wondrous object he had come for. It was a remarkable piece, six equidistant prongs all shiny and black sticking from it like short magic wands. He held it close to his heart just like he would his very own daughter Elise, then aimed his sights cautiously over his shoulder. He wanted to make certain that nobody saw him now, for if another bore witness to this marvelous beauty, they would undoubtedly attempt to snatch it away.
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