Bleak History

by John Shirley

  Bleak got the message. He stepped back. “I...Loraine...just...”

  Sean chuckled. “Just what? Oh, don't look so anxious, Gabey! If you don't try that again, it won't hurt her! If you don't try to jump me and you do what I tell you—why, you'll get your Gothy little hottie back alive and only a little bruised! Just do the working, complete the summoning with me”— Sean's voice dropped a guttural octave as he finished the sentence— “and she will not have her eyes chewed out. “ Sean glanced musingly at Loraine, squirming in the familiar's tightening grasp. “It'll go

  for the eyes first...then the brain. But—not as long as you behave yourself, Gabriel. Look—it's holding off!”

  The centipede familiar snapped its mandibles near her eyes, making her draw her head back an inch, all the room she had. She bit her lip to keep from screaming. The creature had a strong grip on her—but didn't increase it. And it turned to look at Bleak, spitting and clicking, as if to await his decision.

  Bleak felt waves of sick loathing and fury—loathing for what Sean had become, fury at himself for walking into this, for not getting Loraine out of here sooner.

  He should never have taken that cup from Shoella. He should have been looking for this woman. For U.S. Central Containment Authority agent...Loraine Sarikosca.

  His senses keening now, he could sense her connection to him—feel in the deep core of his being that she was The Other. He'd been trusted with the jewel of all rarities. The possibility of perfect love. And he'd let this happen to her.

  “The familiar responds to my thoughts, Gabriel,” Sean said, taking up a place in the center of one of two interlocked silver pentagrams etched on the floor. “So if you try to interfere with it—or me— I'll make it kill her—bang!” Sean snapped his fingers. “Just like that! In a split second! You really have no choice in this. This is your soul mate, Bro! Something ordained by the universe itself. And it says you are driven to take care of her, no matter what. You can't let her die. Emotionally”—he spread his hands and tilted his head, his squiggling smile almost comic—”you're incapable of it! We're counting on that. So—shall we start?”

  “Gabriel...” Loraine's voice was almost inaudible. “I have to die sometime. It's something I can bear. Don't.”

  “What exactly do you want me to do, Sean?” Bleak asked. Desperately thinking that he could do the ritual—and somehow reverse it later. Send the thing they were to summon back.

  But deep down, he doubted it. He'd need Sean's help, to send the thing back—and Sean would never give it.

  Sean made a sniggering sound of triumph. “Excellencio! Now, Gabriel...move to the center of that pentagram opposite me.”

  Bleak moved to the point opposite—and heard a slithery thump. He looked at Loraine, saw she'd shifted, pitching on her right side, taking the twisting coils of the serpentine insect with her, so that it snapped at her in anger, cutting her cheek slightly with its mandible. She was lying close by the still-tranced Dr. Helman.

  “Don't make it angry,” Sean warned her. “I control the familiar—but it has a certain amount of autonomy. It might just choose to take a bite out of you.”

  The centipede's mandibles snapped at her face; she squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head. “Gabriel...”

  “Hang on,” he told her, inwardly calling for guidance. But he was a forest fire of emotion, inside —the roaring of the flames made any contact with the Spirit of Light impossible.

  “It's easy,” Sean said. “Just pay attention, Gabriel. We're going to reach out, into the field of the Hidden. It's so powerful around us now! It's bristling with energy because you and I are close by...and because your li'l love, there, is handy. It's all part of the equation! Now reach out, Gabe, form your field of control, I'll form mine, and we'll push the two against one another, so they contact, but don't try to push me back—just hold it there. I will call out certain names. You call them in turn, after me— make them ring out strong in your mind! You know the drill! And combined with our power, they'll open the doorway—and the Great Wrath will come through!”

  “The artifact will stop it,” Loraine rasped.

  “You are so sadly uninformed, Little Miss Loraine,” Sean jeered. “It's weak enough now to let Moloch in—if I have my brother here to help me. When Moloch is here to serve me and Forsythe, we'll empower the wall again—fully! But some of us will be protected from it...through Moloch!

  CCA agents will be protected from the artifact's suppression.... Something you don't know about, Gabe, Mr. Grand Wisdom! You don't know about that device! We will control it, so that some are able to project magic and no one else will! And Moloch will be our magical powerhouse. Our great ally! He is a being of a different order, and once he's here, its energies will not slow him down! Forsythe and I will control him...and through him, the country!”

  “No!” Loraine said, her voice barely audible. The words choked out as she went on. “Forsythe is Moloch now. Forsythe is not your friend, he's a—”

  “Shut up, you lying bitch!” Sean snarled, turning to her. And the centipede familiar tightened its grip so that she wheezed for air.

  “Ease up on her, Sean—or she'll die!” Bleak warned him. “You won't have any hold on me if she dies!”

  “Then tell her to shut up!”

  But Sean eased the thing's grip and she breathed again.

  “Sean—you're saying that CCA has a way to limit magic to American agents?”

  “Through Moloch...it can limit the power to American agents—to us! ShadowComm will be done...all over the world the magic will belong to only a precious few of us!” Sean gestured grandiloquently. “To Breslin himself, in time! Moloch can give him the power too!”

  So Moloch wanted to take control of the president.

  “But, Sean...listen—”

  “And then,” Sean went on, eyes bright, “we take over the Pentagon—no more resistance there. They will have to do just as we say.... And it begins today! Moloch has promised that the real power will come when we open the way for him.”

  “It'll come through and it'll make you its slave!” Bleak told him despairingly. “Don't be stupid! You're the sucker here, Sean!”

  “No—Forsythe told me! If I let it through, I command it!”

  “That's a lie! Loraine's right—who do you think speaks through Forsythe? It's lying to you! The predators of the Wilderness have always lied, Sean!”

  “They can't lie to me if I control them...and that is what I am going to do today. You are part of this ritual...but it is I who am the High Magician here. It is so ordained! Now...reach out...or we see what happens when we squeeze your destiny woman long and hard enough.”

  Sean caused the giant centipede to tighten its grip just enough to make Loraine cry out in pain.

  “All right!” Bleak shouted. “Ease up on her!” He took a deep breath, the air shivering in and out of him. He had never felt this much fear before. Except...in childhood. “Just—let me concentrate!” He closed his eyes. Felt the shape of the field around him, the shape of his own participation in the energy of the Hidden. A man's personal energy field was shaped like a brain, big enough to contain his whole ass body. As if he were standing within a transparent brain. And Sean had created an identical but opposite field, facing him, pressing against his field, as if they were forebrain to forebrain, the fields sparkling, crackling at their points of contact.

  Bleak caught flashes of Sean's thoughts. Bits of memory. The two of them as small children, chasing a chicken across a yard, laughing. Kicking through piles of dead leaves.

  Men looming over Sean, as he lay in bed, pressing something to his face.

  Rooms. Locked rooms within locked rooms. Tests...A gigantic ache of loneliness like a barren plain shrieking with a cold wind.

  Then Sean was intoning names. Bleak made himself begin to intone the names along with Sean.

  Oh, God. Help me. God forgive me. What am I doing?

  But as Sean Bleak intoned each name of power, Gabriel Bleak
repeated it...

  “Asmodeus...Moloch!”

  “Asmodeus...Moloch!”

  “Tetragrammaton...Moloch!”

  “Tetragrammaton…Moloch!”

  On and on, name after name, till they came to the point where Sean began his sole invocation, his arms lifted, his hands shimmering with dark energy...and between his hands a window opened, into the Farther Hidden, the After the After, the place beyond beyonds, and something was approaching from that beyond-the-beyond: a vast creature that emanated hunger, a creature that looked like living wheels within living wheels, each wheel serrated with inward-turning teeth, and an eye on a stalk in the centermost of the wheels, the stalk stretching out toward them.

  Moloch was coming. To change the world.

  Sean opened his mouth to cry out the final invocation.

  “I'm sorry, Gabriel!” Loraine yelled.

  There was a gunshot...loud in the barren room. Gun smoke wisped.

  The window into the Wilderness fizzed with a confusion of energies—and seemed to swallow itself. It vanished. Moloch was gone—back to the spiritual wilderness.

  Sean was standing there, staring at Bleak—then blood began trickling from his mouth.

  Bleak suddenly remembered Sean just before they'd taken him...at the Dairy Queen, with chocolate syrup, from a dipped ice cream, streaming from his little mouth, just like that blood.

  Sean went to his knees and lifted his hands palms upward—his empty hands.

  He stared at his empty hands.

  Then he slumped over. So that Bleak could see the small, round bullet hole in the side of Sean's head.

  His brother, Sean, was dead. Really dead this time.

  Bleak turned and looked at Loraine—and saw the centipede draining away...the energy draining out of its form as it had come. In two heartbeats, it was gone.

  Loraine lay there on her side, weeping, Helman's .25 pistol held loosely in her limp, outflung hand. “I'm sorry, Gabriel...Had to do something.” She lay close beside the moaning figure of Dr.

  Helman, who had clasped his knees against himself, was rocking in place. “Oh, no no no no...,” he moaned.

  “Helman had a gun in his coat,” Bleak said, thinking it through, out loud. Barely able to think at all. “You took Helman's gun...and you...”

  “I killed your brother,” she sobbed. “You can't love me. I killed your brother and you can't love me now.”

  ***

  STANDING BESIDE GENERAL SWANSON, in the facility's security center.

  Bleak watched the surveillance footage showing General Forsythe hurrying out of the building, submachine gun in hand, calling out to Gulcher, who was staring at the electric fence, at the back gate, trying to figure out how to get over it.

  “The sentries were running around inside, like chickens with their heads cut off,” Swanson said, “looking for whoever shot their boys.”

  On the monitor, Forsythe walked to the gate, took something from his pocket, pressed a button, and the gate rolled back.

  Gulcher stared at Forsythe. Didn't look glad to see him. But after a moment, his shoulders slumping with resignation, he walked off beside Forsythe.

  “That was just, what, half hour ago,” Swanson said wearily, rubbing his eyes. “I have some men out looking for them, but Forsythe kept a car at a lot down the road, and there's an airfield five minutes from here. And General Forsythe had a private jet out there. A CIA loaner—Gulfstream IX—kind of thing they used for rendition.” He grimaced. “Lord, those three young men—I left them with that lunatic.”

  Bleak guessed Swanson was blaming himself for the deaths of the black berets. A feeling he understood.

  “How is General Erlich, sir?” Bleak asked.

  “They've got him breathing, his color's coming back. I still can't wrap my head around it—that it was me who.

  “It wasn't you, General. Not really.”

  “Big mess here. Men dead, and Helman—in some kind of coma. Stuck in it, seems like.” Swanson chewed his lower lip, glancing at Bleak. “You been briefed on the artifact in the north?” “Not exactly.”

  “I'm going to take a chance. I need somebody to help me contain this thing. I don't trust anyone in CCA and no one else has the background. Or the talents.” Swanson shrugged. “It's not procedure. But you told me what you found out. And this is an emergency. I'm going to make a judgment call and tell you some things.... You were puzzling about the artifact...”

  It only took five minutes to tell. About Isaac Newton, the Lodge of Ten. The wall of force.

  Bleak felt shaken to the core, realizing how much of his life had been affected by the artifact.

  He looked closely at General Swanson. “And you need someone from ShadowComm—someone with the right abilities—to fight a rogue from CCA. Sir, that's—”

  “Yeah, I know. It's ironic. You going to work with us or not?”

  “On this...I will. On one condition. There are people contained in this building—imprisoned. Maybe in other CCA facilities. I want them all released. You have the authority to do it. And I think you're a man of your word. Otherwise”—Bleak shook his head—“I can't trust CCA enough to work with it.”

  “You know if Forsythe destroys that thing out there...if he opens the doors completely... if he messes with the artifact...”

  “Oh, it might make the world pretty damned different. Could be it'd help people like me, more than hurt us. But I'll work with you....”

  Swanson grunted. “Guess I can't order you, you're not army anymore. All right. I was probably going to do it anyway. Any containees we have in any facility will be released, on my order, immediately. We'll transport them wherever they want to go. I've already ordered some women who were used in an experiment to be transported to their countries of origin. We'll pay them off, maybe they'll get over it. May as well go the whole route. Shut this thing down and—”

  Swanson broke off. Bleak suspected the general was going to say, And start from scratch. He probably had a plan for a different kind of control agency. Something he didn't want to tell Bleak about.

  They'd deal with that later. Right now... “General?” They turned to see Loraine in the doorway, looking a bit rumpled but more in command of herself. “I just checked...Forsythe's already heading north in the Gulfstream.” “What's he plan?” Swanson asked. She shook her head. “I don't know for sure.”

  ***

  FOURTEEN MINUTES LATER.

  My brother is dead. I failed to help him...I should have saved him...

  They were in a Humvee, Loraine and Bleak, riding to the airfield, with special papers from Swanson, driven by the same driver who'd brought Loraine to Facility 23, when Bleak realized that someone was sitting in the empty seat between him and Loraine. A ghost. He'd half expected Sean— but he felt immediately that it was someone quite different.

  “Cronin?” he said, turning to look closely. The implications dawning on him.

  The old man was sitting placidly beside him, slightly out of alignment with the seat. As if he were moving along on a different plane of relationship to the ground, not actually carried by the Humvee.

  “Yes, Gabriel.”

  “You're...you've passed on?”

  The driver was staring at Bleak in the rearview. “Uh—someone want to tell me who he's talking to?”

  “Don't worry about it,” Loraine said. “Just do your job.”

  “Yes,” Cronin said. “I've moved on. A simple heart attack—ach, not so simple, I was in hospital, it took several hours. Two heart attacks really, to do it, ja? Did you ever read that Mr. C. S. Lewis? I read him in German but I think it's much the same. The author says that when you die, that's like having a tooth pulled, it seems to go on and on and it's awful but...at last the tooth is out, and you feel much better. That is not bad, such a description.”

  He sat in profile, staring ahead, as if looking up the road, not looking at Bleak. But Bleak felt Cronin looking at him, somehow, anyway.

  “Cronin...you can see
Isaac now.”

  Cronin sighed. “Not long ago, he moved on. I see he is well, in the high afterworld. Not so easy to see him yet. But...I see you—my other son.”

  Bleak's heart seemed to clench in his chest, like wringing hands. “I'm going to miss you.”

  “Maybe I stay in touch. And don't worry for your dog, after the first heart attack, I thought maybe I don't die today, but maybe I'm there for a while. I called your friend Donner, on that cell phone you %° gave me—he has Mr. Muddy now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I heard you calling out, in such pain, a little while ago. So I look for you, I follow the traces, I come. You seem not so bad. But you are going to something...what it is, you don't know.” “That's right. Do you?”

  “I have spoken to some who died here. A man, his name was Krasnoff. He says this thing that controls your running general, this Forsythe—it will destroy the thing in the north. I don't know what this thing is, but he says maybe you know. He says a deep darkness will come for the world then, when

  the Great Wrath comes through. This is not what it wanted, but it is another way. So it destroys this thing—and it comes. You understand this?” “I think so. Cronin—”

  “I cannot remain. This is a big effort, already. If I could get a headache, I would have one. But listen—you need anything else? Something more from me? Something to help?” “There is one thing you could do...” They spoke for another minute, then Cronin nodded... And was gone.

  ***

  GULCHER FELT AS IF he'd been swallowed by this Gulfstream jet, flying north, north, and more north. It was comfortable in here, he even had a drink in his hand; it was pretty quiet, what with the new engines, but he felt like he was that Jonah in the whale. No deal with God to get out. Just waiting to be digested.

  General Forsythe sat across from him on the aisle, sitting up with his eyes closed. Twitching every so often, as he communed with...something. Gulcher could see a lot of movement under the general's eyelids, like the guy was in heavy REM sleep. A little saliva dribbled from the corner of Forsythe's mouth.