Fury and the Power

by Farris, John

  Although in previous dreams Eden had been unable to get a true impression of size, it was obvious to her that the pug marks on the marble were very large.

  And red.

  Eden knew their maker had walked in blood, and for several minutes she could not control her trembling.

  Full light, like darkness, comes quickly to Equatorial Africa. In the ten minutes that it took Eden to wash and dress in shorts and a light sweater, the waters of Lake Naivasha, now receded three hundred yards from the house and farm outbuildings of the wildlife reserve, glowed through drifts of mist. Alberta Nkambe had begun her daily half-mile swim in the infinity pool at the edge of the east lawn, overlooking a landscape of farms, bush, and extinct volcanoes, still a little scary in their gaunt passivity. Her best dog, Fernando, a mix of Labrador and mastiff, barked at her every stroke as he kept pace with Bertie on one side of the heated pool.

  Around the farms and coffee-growing estates in the Naivasha region, eighty kilometers up-country from Nairobi and remote from the rest of the world by any reckoning, Eden was known as Eve. Bertie was a superstar model whose face had been appearing on the covers of fashion magazines since she was sixteen. If anyone Eden had been introduced to, at Shungwaya or on rare social occasions at the Naivasha Country Club, recalled her face from satellite TV news, they respected her need for anonymity. She was good-looking, obviously American-bred, and a beauty when she bothered. But at Shungwaya Eden didn't wear makeup and her hairstyle was strictly utilitarian, an expression of psychological isolation from the society she was half afraid to rejoin. She felt no further obligation to its madness.

  She never discouraged the attention of guys near her age whom she'd met—in particular a Belgian graduate student in ethno botany from the University of Ghent, and a Canadian climatologist—but most of the time she made herself unavailable, feeling secure only in Tom Sherard's and Bertie's company. Harrowing times made steadfast companions. Eden badly missed the only mother she'd ever known; but Betts soon would be joining her, coming from California, with a brief stopover in England to visit a younger sister whom she rarely saw.

  The climatologist, a Quebecois named Jean-Baptiste, was camped with several older colleagues on the reserve. They were engaged in extracting core samples of sediment from Naivasha's depths to study catastrophic drought cycles. Two or three times a week he appeared for breakfast and the opportunity to chat up Eden. Jean-Baptiste was one of those homely young men with a rump of a nose and a dark squeeze around the eyes, but he had a brisk mind and a sense of humor.

  This morning Jean-Baptiste was in conversation with Pegeen, a model chum of Bertie's, and her husband, who had the bronzed look of the well-heeled, gadabout sportsman but who seemed serious about making "docs"—documentary films. They had dropped in a few days ago. There was seldom any such thing as an unwelcome guest in Kenya, where "close neighbors" were defined as being within fifty kilometers of one another.

  Eden crossed the lawn to the main house through the drifting vapors of the pool, droplets gleaming like gold dust in the air. There was a flock of emerald-spotted wood doves in one of the old Albizias growing in the middle of the lawn, thick trunks as smooth as ivory. The lawn was about the size of a cricket pitch, which it once had been. There were a couple of reticulated giraffe at one end of the lawn, oxblood in color with a lacy overlay of white lines. Pretty, horned heads and elfin eyes. Just standing around politely, as if they wouldn't mind an invitation to breakfast. Two more of Shungwaya's 13 mixed-breed dog population caught up to Eden and she paused to rub behind their ears before joining the others.

  It had been a dry dusty year, but the jacarandas and frangipani, green and healthy from water piped up from the lake, were in full bloom by the recently rebuilt, split-level veranda. The twin roofs that steeply overhung the veranda were thatched in woven papyrus and rested on elegantly twisted, polished cedar posts. The thatch was pink with fallen blossoms and a young member of the household staff—all Somali males—was sweeping petals from the steps.

  "Jambo, memsaab," the boy said, giving Eden a shy glance.

  "Good morning, Ahmad."

  Pegeen, her husband, and Jean-Baptiste the climatologist were having wake-up coffee and watching the news from London on Sky. Jean-Baptiste flashed Eden a smile that had a lot of meaning and a hint of suggestion in it—Hi, missed you, do you sleep in the nude? Like a lot of men with middling looks, Jean-Baptiste had developed an intricate understanding of and easy rapport with women.

  Eden dropped a friendly hand on his shoulder and sat next to him in a split-bamboo armchair with lion-toned cushions. She was in time to see, on the newscast, a face as familiar in Africa as it was in the U.S.: the evangelist Pledger Lee Skeldon. It appeared to be bad news.

  "What happened?"

  "He was killed last night," Pegeen said with a slight shudder. She was black Irish, with very full lips and Bambi's eyes. Bambi on Prozac. And, according to Bertie, Pegeen was fey. Eden sensed by the way Pegeen sometimes regarded her that she'd haphazardly picked up on Eden's other life, if not her status in the Psi world. She didn't feel uncomfortable about Pegeen's knowing. Eden was reading auras with more confidence, a talent in which Bertie had instructed her. According to Pegeen's aura, she lacked guile or duplicity. Unfortunately the dead were too much with her, and they could be a nuisance to a latent spiritualist.

  Pegeen's husband, an Englishman named Etan Culver, had no clue what was wrong when his bride drifted into one of her melancholy, speechless moods. Bertie had decided that she and Eden needed to work with Pegeen before her new marriage foundered.

  "Killed? Accident, or—"

  "Murdered," Jean-Baptiste said. His English was lightly accented. "Before a crowd at one of his revival meetings. They have the footage, apparently, but—"

  "Much too gruesome," Etan said. He had a three-day growth of beard that didn't become him, and his eyes all but disappeared when he was hung over. Today made three mornings in a row. "A high school boy attacked and bit him in the throat before anyone could interfere. The bite severed his carotid artery. He was dead within a minute."

  Pegeen shook her head nervously, then leaned against his shoulder on the loveseat they occupied.

  The chief Somali houseman, seven feet in his red fez, brought Eden a cup of the green tea she preferred drinking in the morning, with ginseng added for mental acuity.

  "Why did he do it?" Eden wondered, looking at what must have been a high school yearbook photo of Jimmy Nixon.

  "We'll probably never know," Jean-Baptiste said. "A security guard became overanxious and bashed his skull with a riot baton. Report had it the boy is in critical care, and he may be a veg."

  Eden glanced at him, then concentrated on the televised image, the appealing smile on Jimmy's broad face. Not ashamed to show his braces, which had turned teeth into choppers. But the flavor of him wholesome, untainted. True-blue innocence, this Jimmy, who had been overtaken by a swift madness, had done an incomprehensible, savage thing—the bite a kiss of death, orgiastic—and now lay in a state of twilight forgetfulness.

  A shadow appeared on the TV screen, over Jimmy Nixon's face. Eden looked away quickly, into Pegeen's astonished, fearful eyes. She was about to speak.

  Eden said quietly, "Not now."

  Apparently no one else had witnessed the quick shadow. Etan Culver opened his eyes slightly, from slits to slashes of chilly blue, giving Eden a puzzled look.

  "What's that, luv?"

  Eden shrugged. The TV news moved on. To a war zone. One of the bleak places of the earth. Asia, Africa, South America. Didn't matter, Eden thought. Always there were refugees on a long road with black smoke rising behind them. The faces, always the same. The dispossessed. Children with the fixed gazes that only extreme terror can provide. Men who want to cry but can't. Old women in black, their faces carved into rigid masks of rage through decades of abuse, despair. On the move again. Grab and carry or drag what you can. A pot. A goat on a rope. Nothing at the end of this road. They're all
the same. The same old nothing. Live another day. Or don't.

  Eden closed her eyes. She hated the morning news, never more than when she'd been part of it herself. Up only thirty minutes, already her heart felt sore, the day seemed devoid of promise.

  "Didn't this happen before?" Jean-Baptiste said, and Eden nodded. "No, I mean, how the preacher was killed. I remember reading—"

  "Yes," Pegeen said, in that just-smoldering, loamy Irish voice. "There was another murder similar to this one. My roommate in New York"—she named an actress beginning to make a name for herself—"was quite upset when she heard the news. It would've been about a year ago, just before I met you, Etan. Tams and her boyfriend had spent several weeks in India, at the ashram of Tams's guru. I don't know the name, but he is, or was, famous provided one is keen for that sort of spiritual trip. He was supposed to have been a god on earth, with uncanny powers."

  "He must have read his tea leaves wrong the day he got offed," Jean-Baptiste said, then interrupted himself with a yawn. "Who killed this guru?"

  "No idea. Another sojourner, a disciple, I believe it was. But the method—" Pegeen's eyes went to Eden again, who smiled sympathetically. Pegeen drank coffee, giving memory her full scrutiny, then continued in a hushed voice. "It was the same ghastly method. Neck was bitten through, the artery severed."

  "Let's-pretend vampires," Jean-Baptiste said with a grimace. "All the kids these days into cult stuff. Goth." He closed the subject with a palms-up gesture. "Your roommate was Tamora Pass? I saw her in that Mission Impossible sequel."

  "Bloody film looked as if it were edited in a blender," Etan grumbled.

  Breakfast was served; they moved to the table. Jean-Baptiste soon had them laughing about the way some of his colleagues spent their off-hours, obsessively staging and betting on cockroach races. Cockroaches the size of Matchbox automobiles. They kept their huge and pampered pets in lozenge tins that they carried with them in their shirt pockets during the day.

  "Bugging out in Africa," Jean-Baptiste said.

  "Of course," Etan said, sucking up coffee, "only in our obsessions do we meet the promise of a truly meaningful life."

  "Cockroaches are meaningful?" Eden asked.

  "As long as they don't finish out of the money."

  Pegeen didn't laugh. She continued to look at Eden, seeming adrift and dismayed, wanting confirmation of what they'd both seen on the tube during the bad news from Atlanta.

  The opaque orange shuka Bertie had put on after her nearly nude swim billowed like flame as she crossed the lawn barefoot, followed by adoring dogs.

  "Here comes enough body heat to leave an imprint on stone," Jean-Baptiste said wistfully.

  "Behave," Eden chided. "She's spoken for."

  "None remain but you and me, Eve. I may not be the First Man, but I'm just as deserving, mon cher."

  "And an optimist," Eden said, but with a smile, acknowledging the sacrifice of his pawn. And not unwilling to continue the game. He had a face like a bloodhound with a bad head cold, but his body was lean and fine. Just one of those guys you could feel guilty about for not liking them. Actually she did like Jean-Baptiste, although he could be talkative while never revealing much about himself. In that respect, at least, they were a matched pair.

  Tom Sherard and Joseph Nkambe, Bertie's father, returned at twenty past eight with the body of the leopard Tom had settled shortly after daybreak, when the leopard returned from nocturnal prowling to his customary hide, where he laid up during the day. They all went out to the lake side of the house to have a look at the body, tied down on the bonnet of a Land Rover.

  On the point of one shoulder there was a punched-out floret from the .375-caliber expanding bullet that had killed the cat, blowing pieces of bone like shrapnel through the chest cavity. The open eyes were a glazed yellow, like the flesh of a cut lemon left all day in a saucer. The six-foot leopard had been tagged, with the particulars of the kill noted on the tag. The remains would be turned over to the Kenyan Wildlife Service.

  Sherard looked drawn and tired. Probably he should have left this hunt to another pro, Eden thought, because of a left leg that still pained him and lacked strength after an assassin's bullets had nearly demolished the knee. Hunters of leopard often turned out to be the hunted if a shot only wounded the animal, which was often the case. Nervous exhaustion, not exhilaration, was a common reaction to those who remained unscathed after a leopard hunt. He had waited motionless in the dark for hours, never knowing if the most cunning of big cats might be creeping up behind them, just outside the blind in the leaning tree that he and Joseph had constructed after Tom patiently tracked the leopard to his lair.

  The hunters handed over guns and Tom's leopard bag, which was filled with practical items like body armor, disinfectant, and Syrettes of morphine, to Hassan, the Somali head of the Shungwaya household. There was a reflection of a cruising vulture on the Land Rover's windscreen. Pegeen Culver approached the dead leopard, shading her eyes against the sun flare off glass.

  Small shapely head, the sprawled body supple even in death. A beautiful creature, claws like razors, retracted now. The leopard had eviscerated and eaten most of a child. Her husband photographed Pegeen with the leopard. He had a kitful of the latest in digital video equipment. At Etan's urging Pegeen diffidently touched a dangling paw. Retreated, shuddering.

  Etan Culver interviewed Sherard, who submitted graciously but had no use for it. He wanted a bath and breakfast.

  "Is that what you saw?" Eden said quietly in Pegeen's ear. "On the face of the boy who killed the preacher?"

  Several dik-dik sauntered along the driveway, attracted by the tasty buds of bougainvillea. One of the estate dogs loped toward them, chasing them away. Hippos were lounging and splashing in their muddy pools. White pelicans flew along the lakeshore where stubs of drowned trees had reappeared from the blue depths. There was a sizzle of tiny insects nearby, weaving a universe in air, one day and they were done.

  "No," Pegeen said. "A catlike body, but huger. And the head was not that of a cat. It had a sneering, thuggish face."

  Eden nodded glumly. She was familiar with the animal described, although Pegeen hadn't been in Africa long enough to have seen one.

  Bertie Nkambe, who had an arm around Tom Sherard's waist as he responded halfheartedly to the filmmaker's questions on camera, glanced at them. Bertie looked serenely happy. Eden felt a pang of envy. It was like the touch of a fly on her skin, to be brushed away. She looked again at Pegeen, whose eyes were dreary. Pegeen, who had asthma, massaged her throat with a pale childlike hand, as if the dry air was choking her.

  "Sure and it'll be comin' here," Pegeen confirmed.

  "You don't have to be afraid, Pegeen."

  "What does it want? Why is it comin'?"

  "I don't know yet. But when it does come. . . Tom will kill it."

  If it can be killed.

  Pegeen looked at her husband, who was absorbed in his craft.

  "I hate it here," she said, suddenly in tears. "There's too much of death, everywhere. But Etan won't listen. He won't leave."

  Chapter 3

  VATICAN PALACE

  ROME, ITALY

  OCTOBER 10

  0500 HOURS ZULU

  His Holiness Pope John the Twenty-fourth, born Sebastiano Leoncaro in a small Piedmont town seventy-two years ago, awoke as was his habit promptly at five A.M. in the papal apartment overlooking the Piazza of St. Peter's.

  Espresso with a dash of whipped cream was waiting outside his bedroom door, brought to him by Sister Pasqualina, one of the staff of elderly nuns of the Sisters of the Poor who looked after Leoncaro's daily needs.

  Following his prayer for guidance during a long working day and a set of light exercises prescribed for a chronic back condition, Leoncaro treated himself to music—Elgar's Dream of Gerontius—which he listened to on headphones while he made his first diary entry for October 10. There had been a thunderstorm during the night, breaking the heat wave that had lingered well int
o the month. The windows of his study next to the bedroom had been opened for him. The curtains stirred in a predawn breeze that held the sweetness of the summer's air at Lake Albano, only fourteen miles away but fourteen hundred feet higher than smog-plagued Rome.

  His source of light at this early hour was a green-shaded student's lamp that had been with him since his early days at the Angelicum and through his globetrotting years as a Vatican diplomat. The lamp sat directly in front of him on the writing desk. A pool of light illuminated both his diary and proof pages of one section of the papal Anuncio he had been working on for three years. The rest of his study was in deep shadow.

  After a few minutes it became apparent to Leoncaro that he was no longer alone. He continued his writing for another minute, then closed his diary, removed the headphones, and laid them on the desk. He looked up over the edges of his half glasses at the figure seated on the small divan opposite him. Hadn't been there when Leoncaro entered his study. The door remained closed. So it was a Visitation. And the news was likely to be grim.

  Leoncaro's upper lip had been scarred during a brief pro career in boxing after World War II. The scar glowed whitely when his lips compressed in an expression of shock and concern.

  "Sorry to disturb you, Sebastiano," his visitor said deferentially, in his familiar North Georgia drawl.

  "So it's happened to you," Leoncaro replied, looking at the hideously torn throat, the bled-out, slightly evanescent body.

  "'Fraid so."

  "I'm deeply sorry."

  "It appears he's on a rampage," the Shade of Pledger Lee Skeldon observed. Vocal cords had been destroyed, so the Shade's lips didn't move. But the form of communication they were using was older than spoken language. And they shaped their thoughts colloquially, not in formally rhymed voice.