by Farris, John
"He just added a fifth one," Sherard said.
"What talent."
"You haven't seen anything yet. Take another look."
After several seconds of studying the distant terrace through her binoculars, Courtney said softly, "Be damned." She slowly lowered the glasses, turned her face to Sherard, perplexed.
"He is a magician," Tom said with a slight smile.
"But nobody can do that. Leave five balls suspended in air and just walk away."
"You've missed something important."
Courtney had another look. "What? Oh, now I get it. Five balls, five points in the shape of a star."
"Or a pentagram, as the ancients called it. An occult symbol."
"Meaning what?"
"A couple of things. Grayle knows we're here, and why. The pentagram is his warning: stay away from this house."
"Which we are going to ignore."
"You got me this far, Courtney. But the stalk is getting real now. You're under no obligation to continue."
She had a crooked grin that revealed a feral glint of tooth.
"Just like a man. Now that I'm falling in love, you want to get rid of me?"
They were more than halfway from their former place of concealment on the mountain, within sight of the ribbon of blacktop that served Lincoln Grayle's secluded house, when they heard a car. They faded back into a shadowy draw where clear water trickled in a dozen streams down the mossy rock facings.
Tom had a quick look at the magician, alone in an antique silver sports car, gearing down to negotiate a sharp curve as he sped away from the house. From the sound of the engine Sherard guessed that Grayle could be driving one of the Cobra Daytona coupes from Carroll Shelby's glory days. Maybe Grayle was just out for a spin, or he was on his way to the theatre. But his absence removed a big obstacle in getting Gwen quickly out of the house.
They followed the road the rest of the way, to a stone-paved garage area beneath the first cantilevered level. Grayle also owned an Escalade, a Dodge Ram 1500 pickup with huge knobbed tires and a snowplow mount on the front bumper, and a sixteen-passenger van. There was an elevator in the garage. No one seemed to be around. They heard novelty Christmas music from an unseen speaker: Jan and Dean's "Surfin' Santa." Courtney checked out the Cadillac SUV, grinned at Sherard, and made a turning motion with thumb and forefinger together: key in the ignition. Tom nodded. She unzipped a pocket on her backpack and withdrew her taser gun.
On the first level of the stacked house a Hispanic girl with a single long braid down her back was running a polisher on the marble floor. She had her back to the elevator and was listening to ranchera on headphones. She didn't hear the elevator door open. Courtney handed Sherard her taser and pounced on the girl, grasping the convenient braid in her fist, clamped a gloved hand over the girl's mouth.
Sherard stepped in and wrenched off the girl's headphones; Courtney sharply pulled her head back by the braid.
"Calma, muchacha. Where is the red-haired guest of El Magico?"
"Segundo piso," the girl said behind Courtney's muffling hand, rolling her eyes like a horse in a burning stable. "Doan hurt me."
"Don't make us hurt you. Who else is in the house now?"
"No se, no se."
Courtney let go of the braid and flicked fingers in front of the girl's face. One, two, three—the girl nodded quickly at four, her best estimate, probably. She was still rolling her eyes when Sherard taped her mouth shut. Courtney grabbed the braid close to the roots and pulled her backward into the small elevator. The floor polisher was still running, maintaining an illusion that the girl's chores were properly being attended to. Sherard stepped into the elevator behind them. They went slowly up to the second level, Courtney continuing to hold the girl erect by her braid, speaking softly in her ear. Sherard didn't understand Spanish, but the girl calmed down; from her expression her brain had vapor-locked.
The door opened again, revealing a preoccupied young man with the high forehead and scoop nose of an Easter Island artifact; he had folders in his hands. As if he were recoiling from a snake pit his upper body jerked back almost a foot at the sight of the girl with duct tape over her mouth. Before he could get his own mouth open to question their intentions or shout bloody murder Tom shot him with Courtney's taser and he collapsed on the floor, fifty thousand volts blitzing his nervous system, loose papers all around him.
The sight of his helpless thumping and writhing got the girl going again in the direction of hysteria; Courtney shoved her, stumbling, past the young man and down another marble corridor with ochre walls and closed white doors. Sherard disconnected the young man from the taser and followed, hearing Dwight Yoakum in bluesy Sensurround: "Santa Claus Is Back in Town."
Halfway down the corridor the girl gestured to one of the doors. But she fought Courtney in a flare up of frenzy when Courtney put a hand on the doorknob. Courtney had had enough of her antics; she popped the girl over one ear with the lead-lined heel of the glove on her right hand. The girl wobbled and her eyes lost focus. She sank down with her back against the wall and slowly fell over.
Tom had his own taser gun out; Courtney glanced at him, nodded, then bulled her way shoulder-first into the room.
Which turned out to be the sitting room of a nice suite with a terrace facing pale western skies and a bleak mountain range that marked the northwest boundary of the great Mohave Desert.
Eden Waring's doppelganger was seated at a small table with her hands folded on several of the photographs she had glanced at while in Lincoln Grayle's company. She seemed unnaturally still; her head was slightly bowed in the direction of a small crystalline red skull placed in the exact center of the table.
Only it wasn't Gwen at all. They were seeing a three-dimensional shell, a holographic image of great sharpness, but still a reproduction of what was, in the first instance, a copy itself.
"Lord a' mercy," Courtney Shyla said in a hushed voice. "What have we here?"
"We're too late," Tom said, a twinge of anxiety in his heart. "Gwen's gone."
"Gone where?"
"She's taking a little trip through time," Marcus Woolwine said behind them.
Sherard turned, leveling his taser at the bowlegged, nut brown man with the silvery mirror glasses. Woolwine, in the doorway, raised both hands in a wry, exaggerated protective gesture. "Please don't," he said. "I have a pacemaker." He didn't otherwise seem very perturbed.
"Who are you?" Sherard said.
Woolwine introduced himself. "And you would be Tom Sherard. I know of you, of course." He looked curiously at the lion's-head stick in Tom's other hand. "Gwen and I are old acquaintances, from Plenty Coups, where I recently was employed. You may have heard."
"What do you have to do with this?" Sherard said with still another look at holographic Gwen. Courtney had edged closer to the image of the dpg, causing a mild fluctuation like a breeze disturbing the surface of a pond, but she seemed more fascinated by the bloody vacancy of the crystal skull. Tom was aware of a resonance in the room; he felt it in his temples.
"Nothing much, really," Woolwine replied. "This is Gwen's doing, in her desire to be helpful to our host. I'm just keeping an eye on things for Gwen, monitoring fluctuations while she's… away." He seemed to be about to smile at some irony in this description, but instead said sharply to Courtney Shyla, "Get away from there; you must touch nothing in this room! The image she left with us is a crucial point of reference for Gwen, should she hope to return when her... explorations are concluded. Just by your unwanted presence you've already disturbed the several electromagnetic fields she will rely on in plotting an accurate return within the continuum."
"Where did she go?" Sherard demanded. "Where is she?"
"With any luck—" Woolwine adopted a colder tone. "But that is no business of yours."
"Guess again."
"Tom," Courtney said, giving the crystal skull a fishy eye, "I'd swear this evil little thing is talking to me. Sounds like one of those rag head dialects you hear in—"
"It finds you susceptible," Woolwine advised her. "And the language would not be one anyone on earth is familiar with."
"Susceptible to what?" Courtney said, rubbing the back of her head as if to tame a virulent itch.
"You may hope never to find out." Woolwine looked at Tom. "Obviously you will not be taking Gwen with you when you leave here. Which should be immediately. Poor Mr. Dilly by the elevator seemed to be dazed more than injured, so we'll dismiss the possibility of criminal charges being brought against you both. Just go."
They were on their way down the mountain and out of sight of the magician's house when Courtney Shyla flexed her shoulders and said without looking around, "We're being followed."
"Man or beast?"
"Don't know. Haven't seen anything." She looked up at a solitary circling eagle. "I just feel it coming on. It's an instinct you'd better learn to develop in Special Forces."
"Or hunting big game," Sherard amended, although he didn't share her conviction someone or something else was trailing them. The road was empty. The day clear. They were walking along the side of the road, steep sunless cedar woods a few feet away on their left. Across the road there was a steel guardrail and several hundred feet of sheer emptiness beyond that.
"That's what you used to do?" Courtney took a ten-millimeter glock pistol from a holster at the small of her back.
"I was raised to hunt." Tom stopped and lifted his walking stick above his head, intently regarding the lion's head.
"What are you doing?"
"I usually can sense when an animal is behind me, even if it's lurking in tall grass. But to detect the supernatural, I need supernatural help."
Courtney said with a sinkhole of a grin, "Do you suppose that crystal skull has a set of crystal bones to go with it?"
"There are worse things around. I've seen a couple of them in my travels."
"Thanks, I don't want to—" Courtney stopped as if her throat had frozen shut. The gold lion's head was turning on the knuckly shaft, eyes and mouth open. Gold eyeballs and gold fangs, of course. "How do you do that?" she croaked.
"It's not of my volition. Mopane wood from time out of mind has had special spiritual qualities. As for the head of Simba, it was empowered by someone very dear to me, for my protection. That was, by the way, her doppelganger you saw in the suite at Grayle's house."
Courtney was, basically, nonplussed.
"The, the time-traveler."
"Courtney, keep your wits about you."
"I'm fine! The rest of the world has gone nuts, apparently. What is your—what is Simba trying to tell us?"
"It apprehends what we're unable to. Yet."
Courtney, doubting, took a fast look around. They were, she could clearly see, still alone. There was no change in the glistening atmosphere.
Except for a couple of rainbow-hued spheres, each about two inches in diameter, drifting toward them, a dozen feet or so above the road.
"Soap bubbles? Where did they come from?"
"I don't think they're soap bubbles," Tom said. "Remember the spheres Grayle was juggling?"
—"Yeah, five of them."
"Here come the other three," Torn said, aiming his walking stick up the road.
"So what?"
"I don't know. But I think we should remain still until we find out what this means."
"I'll show you what it means," Courtney said in a fit of exasperation. She drew a bead on the nearest sphere with her Glock 10 and fired a shot.
The sphere trembled when struck but didn't dissipate or fly to pieces. When it resumed its perfect shape, it seemed a little larger. And the hollow-nosed bullet from Courtney's pistol was perfectly centered inside the sphere, floating along with it.
Sherard saw the slackness in Courtney's face, that near-death look of stupefying shock. He put out a hand to steady her but she dodged away, teeth flashing white in a bizarre grin.
"Courtney, wait—"
She made a snorting sound as she plunged off the road and into the trees, seeking familiar wilderness, deep woods, concealment, the only refuge she respected.
"No, you're safer with me!"
The other sphere that had been closest to them took a new direction, leisurely trailing Courtney in her headlong flight. This sphere too seemed to be increasing in size, by what dark magic Sherard couldn't imagine.
A third sphere, he noticed then, was coming straight at his head.
The gold lion's-head stick trembled in his grip. Tom agreeably released it. The stick met the incoming sphere—which had no apparent rotation, an unnerving phenomenon that made it impossible for him to judge its velocity—with a level swing that sent it flying, intact, in the direction of an eagle soaring leisurely above the canyon across the road. The sound of impact was more rifle shot than homerun clout.
The other two spheres appeared to pick up their pace, rising in the air thirty feet or more, then falling toward him. Again he had no sense of their speed, but the walking stick took the measure of the spheres and swung twice more, faster than his eye could follow. Two more line drives out over the canyon.
That left the ever-growing sphere that had absorbed the bullet from Courtney's pistol. It came at Tom also, hopped like a knuckleball when the stick took a powerful hack at it, and veered off toward the woods. About the size of a basketball, and with a sunny glow inside where the bullet at its center was melting, dissipating in copper droplets.
Tom heard the battle-toughened Courtney cry out in terror.
"Simba!"
The walking stick flew to his outstretched hand. He followed the glowing sphere into thick woods, depending heavily on his stick to get him past rough footing on an uphill track. The sphere sailed easily around thick conifer trunks, bounced airily over ledges and windfalls until it reached a small clearing where the other sphere had come to rest, huge now, at least six feet in diameter and shining like a lighthouse mirror.
Courtney Shyla was, remarkably, inside the brightness of the sphere, condemned to an agonizing, futile struggle, still screaming, to judge from the terrible contortions of her face. But he couldn't hear a sound from her.
As Tom watched in agitated but helpless horror the flesh of Courtney's face began to melt like butter in a chafing dish. Beads of rendered flesh and superheated brains dappled rain like the inside of the sphere while her bared bones took on a dread appearance, flashy as the red crystal of the ancient skull that had so fascinated her in the magician's house.
When her heated eyeballs drifted from their sockets like dead planets orbiting a dwarf malevolent sun and her limbs went slack inside her clothing, gloves drooping from skeletal hands, Sherard, nothing in his mind except escape from the probability of his own entrapment and gruesome death, ran, certain that both spheres had become too large for the magic that the walking stick could muster: the magician's virtuoso spell had the force of timeless evil behind it.
Ran, in spite of grinding pain in the knee no surgeon could completely make right again, with no idea of how to defeat what lay behind, what followed him now, although he didn't risk a second glance to gauge the lessening distance between himself and the buoyantly pursuing sphere: a slip, a bad fall, death would be there to suck him in like poor Courtney. Shock inspired speed and agility; flight summoned cunning. What did the spheres feed on so glibly other than flesh, what gave them motion?
The air itself, perhaps, charged as it was by the light of a midday sun.
Sherard looked for darkness in the woods and, as he was growing drastically short of breath, found it: a seam in the face of a bluff beneath an overhanging ledge, and falling water from a subterranean source fed by the melting of winter's snowpack.
He wedged himself into the seam a dozen feet or so and watched the slow dance of the pursuing sphere outside the lazy waterfall, flushed a pearly pink, unable to reach him. Nor was it able to maintain either its size or buoyancy once the sun moved on and early darkness fell on this side of the mountain. When the last beam of the sun withdrew, th
e sphere went with it.
By then it was past three o'clock in the afternoon, according to his watch. Shuddering in the sunless chill and wet from the dripping walls of his hideaway, he resolved to remain where he was until full dark. Thinking of Courtney Shyla's scintillant bones lying now in shadow on the forest floor, could he ever find the words to describe her fate? Implacable evil, he reflected, took a lot of explaining to the uninitiated. He didn't feel adequate to the task, but it wasn't a moral choice. Courtney would have to be accounted for, to those who cared for or loved her.
Chapter 50
2:15 P.M.
Implacable evil.
That wasn't exactly the last thing on Bertie Nkambe's mind as her long lunch with Charmaine ended. The fashion show sponsored by the Vegas Neiman Marcus store as lagniappe for the luncheon guests on the terrace overlooking a bracelet of pools around a sandy island with palm trees had partly distracted Bertie for a while; but the sight of tanned young honeymooners, preschool children squealing like minks in the wave pool, and a gin-rummy foursome of old bronzed men with road kill chest hair, looking like mobsters long gone to seed, only reminded her of another body, that of the luckless Lewis Gruvver, who soon must be accounted for.
Her cautious probing of Charmaine's mind (for Bertie it was the mental equivalent of touring barefoot dark pathways salted with sharp objects and white-hot coals) convinced her of little more than the sad fact that nothing very human was left of this winsome girl, almost exactly her own age, whom Mordaunt had arrogantly claimed for himself. There could be no punishment to fit a crime this terrible. But Bertie resolved to do her best.
While they had eaten their light lunch, enjoyed a glass apiece of sauvignon blanc, and chatted about nothing of importance, including the cutthroat ritzy business of high fashion that was conducted by sophisticated greed heads for whom fawning was a high art and neurasthenic designers of varied specious charms, Charmaine was at all times watchful behind her lovely smile, in the way of an animal that hadn't begun to satisfy its blood hunger with a plate of thin-sliced prime rib and tomato in aspic. Bertie was not as unsuspecting as the late Mr. Gruvver might have been; she knew she was certain prey of Mordaunt, the deed entrusted to his ensorcelled cutie. How and when the attack would come was Charmaine's secret. What Charmaine couldn't know was that it would be neither a novelty nor much of a challenge to Bertie, who was very much at home in the distorted netherworld to which Charmaine had only recently been introduced, through the Trickster's beguilement, or by a ritual darkening of her soul.