“Uh, well, that depends on what you call ‘good.’”
“Don’t weasel on me. You’d better have something good. Because this is not going to fly without it. I don’t know how carefully you looked at that contract, but if they don’t like the goods, they can demand their money back. And you would not want to tangle with their lawyers.”
Ray gave an enormous sigh. “Okay. I’ve got dirt.”
Lou hung up and Ray shuddered.
He had dirt, all right.
Ray woke early the next morning in a foul mood. It was pouring down icy rain. He scurried across the street, the laptop buried under his coat like an infant. He was stepping onto the curb in front of Jo’s when a car raced through a puddle and soaked a pant leg. At least the computer was safe.
Jo brought him coffee and a flaky sweet thing. “This is on the house. You look like you could use a little sweetening. What are you pissed about?”
“I’m not.” His jaw was set, his hands balled on the table.
“It’s raw business when your honey’s banging somebody else. Some asshole.”
He winced. “Yeah.” But that wasn’t it. It was the next part of the story.
The evening of the first gathering in the new Meeting Hall marked the emergence of a new phase of The Way and a new Karl. He no longer delivered abstract pontifications in a honeyed baritone. He got personal, addressing questions to each of us in turn.
“Bodine, what did you eat this morning?”
“Two eggs and toast with—”
Karl interrupted. “Harold, recite the three rules.”
“Uh, let’s see. Never Speak. Never—”
He interrupted again. “Ray, what color are Lorraine’s eyes?”
I flinched. I had no idea. I glanced over at her, but she was blocked by the person next to me. Which was cheating anyway. “Uh, I…”
“Lorraine, why is Ray blushing?”
I was blushing because Karl had caught me being unaware. Awareness was what we were supposedly after: being there, in the present moment. And if you didn’t know the color of Lorraine’s damned eyes, it meant you weren’t there. Which meant you were no better than all those hopeless people out in the world, what Karl called slugs. Blind, mewling, crawling, stinking slugs.
Did anyone ever dare ask Karl what the first thing he ate that morning was? Did he really remember? You’d no more dare that than you would stick your head in the mouth of a dragon.
Ray’s face was hot, and he was practically panting.
There was no hiding, even sitting at the back of the hall as I did. Karl might, at any moment, turn to me and bore his steely eyes into mine. Though everyone’s gaze was riveted up front, I felt seen by all of them, exposed.
It had been cold in that basement laying the bricks. But at least we were moving. Sitting there now with no heat, it wasn’t five minutes before the chill started seeping up into my legs through the cushion, then into my belly. I tried to fight it off because I knew when it reached my chest I’d start shivering. Finally I found the solution: a thick wool cap.
I was sitting still with everyone else, waiting for Karl. He glided in, surveying the room, and made a beeline for me. He plucked my hat off and flung it in a corner with a sneer. I guess I hadn’t seen the rule: NO HATS. Was his fashion sense offended?
He leaned down into my face. “That isn’t going to keep you warm.” Then he addressed the group. “If you were properly here, in this room, properly aware, you’d be filled with energy. So full that you’d be hot to the touch.” He laid a hand to my cheek. I flinched. “He’s ice.” He pretended to shiver, mocking me, and murmured, “Poor Ray.” He raised his voice, just a half a decibel, but I practically jumped at the excoriating tone: “Be a man!”
Eventually, Karl would let up on us and go off into his philosophy. Soon as that happened, I had to struggle to keep my eyes open. When I wasn’t overcome by torpor, I was consumed by resentment. It had been months since I’d laid this floor, and I hadn’t once had a private audience with Karl. He often skipped meetings, leaving that asshole Ethan in charge. I was relieved, because then I could doze. My eyelids would drift down, and I’d jerk awake. I somehow never actually crashed into the people sitting around me. I was on the constant verge of sleep because my body, all of me, was reaching the point of total exhaustion.
The obvious question is, why did I stay? Why suffer and live in constant fear? Because Karl had instilled a greater fear: the fear of being cast from the circle, into the Outer Darkness.
“This Way is the only way. There is no life outside of here. You see the world out there, people in their cars, on the street, bearing their burdens, bearing children. They might as well be dead. Without me, without this”—he gestured around at The House—“you, too, would be walking corpses. It would be better that you slit your own throat than continue shambling about through days empty of meaning.”
He stared at each of us, into each of us in turn, transmitting what he never had to say: Don’t think of leaving.
I wasn’t about to leave. What was terrifying was the prospect of being “sent away.”
Because that’s what was happening to people. What were their crimes? Or was Karl just making examples of them?
Let me be clear: Though there were specific days when we were not to speak at all, with the exception of meals, we never took a complete vow of silence. Aside from occasional days of silence, it was acceptable to communicate about practical matters. “Go to the store and buy twelve gallons of milk.” “Take those trees out, roots and all.” What Karl meant when he commanded, “Never speak about what we do” was that we shouldn’t indulge in frivolous speech. Which meant no talking about Karl or the exercises, and nothing remotely approaching gossip. And no revealing our involvement in the group to the outside world: not to mothers, fathers, siblings, or friends.
That didn’t stop people from whispering, “What happened to Joe?” or from the anguished reply, “He was sent away,” spoken as if poor Joe had been deported to dark Siberia.
My fear of being exiled seems crazy, unless you consider what Susan told me she’d learned in an Anthropology class about the ancestral origins of the terror of being cast out of a group. There was once safety in that circle around the campfire. Safety in numbers and in the fire that kept cave bears and sabertooths at bay. To be sent away into the darkness meant more than the hurt of being an outcast. It meant being literally eaten alive.
Now I can’t believe our arrogance in swallowing the idea that out of billions of people, the fifty of us had been chosen to be in this group. The only group that had a prayer of attaining anything of value in this life.
But I did. Because I still felt Karl was working magic on me. I extrapolated from that the belief that this, our circle of disciples, was enchanted. The only thing that could get me to leave was if that circle was broken. I couldn’t conceive of anything breaking it.
Taking a page out of Luke, Karl told us that we couldn’t follow him unless we put him before our wives and children, even before our own lives.
The wife part was increasingly easy with Susan: Our marriage was crumbling. What else had I had? My music. And as long as the circle remained unbroken, I continued to sacrifice it.
The pitiful thing is that even once we knew we were in the select fifty on the planet, Karl said, “This way is very hard. Only one, maybe two of you will make it.”
Karl’s questions got very personal. Now when he spoke someone’s name they were to stand.
“When did you last masturbate? Tell us about it.”
“Crystal. You’re having your period now. I can smell it on your breath. Tell the men what it feels like.” I don’t remember what she said in response. I was so horrified that I shut down, went away someplace.
It was the seventies. I’d heard of EST and Synanon, with their harsh methods for breaking down the ego, fo
r overcoming hang-ups. In Eastern traditions it was called “crazy wisdom,” unconventional, bizarre, even violent acts by a teacher whose purpose was to awaken you to a higher state, to your true self. I figured that’s what Karl was doing.
Except those harsh methods never brought me to the light. They only resulted in humiliation and a visceral sense of awfulness.
Leaving the group was out of the question: I wasn’t going into the Outer Darkness. But staying was approaching impossible. I felt myself in a vise, and Karl was squeezing, squeezing....
A squawk and Ray looked up. Three women sat at the next table, yakking it up, and one had laughed. He hadn’t even noticed their arrival.
Jo stopped by. “Heavy lifting today, huh? Glad I’m not writing.”
That last bit had been rough. Yet his instinct had been correct: The little trickle had become a flood. Before, he’d had trouble starting. Now he couldn’t stop. It was like the old Teletype machine in Bodine’s museum had hooked itself up to his fingers. A dispatch would arrive, and he’d start furiously typing away, then, as abruptly, stop cold. The pressure would build, then with no warning, another posting would blast through him. It was as if the automatic writing was happening in bright daylight, without the benefit of absinthe. Just coffee.
As he worked his way deeper into The House, revealing more secrets, his apprehension grew.
Only one thing conferred instant immunity from that fear: the writing. It was like an addiction loop. The writing created a hangover of terror for which the cure was more writing—which fostered worse terror.
He needed to nail this next piece before he chickened out.
Karl was more and more absent. Weeks would pass without him appearing. We would meet and just meditate, Karl’s cushion before us empty. Hugh was Karl’s drummer, and up in the hierarchy right below Ethan. He sat up in the front row near Karl. One night, his cushion, too, was empty.
The atmosphere in the group had become foul and heavy, so oppressive that my discipline about not talking slipped. I caught Winker out at the back of the property alone and whispered, “Where’s Hugh?”
He averted his eyes. “Away.”
“Not sent away?”
“No, just away.”
Was “away” more code, like so many seemingly ordinary words that came from Karl’s tongue? I told myself Hugh was probably just in Albany, doing some business for Karl. Except that when he returned a few days later, he looked different.
Then Ethan disappeared. This time it was obvious—when he returned from wherever he’d been, he was no longer his prickly self. His pace was languid, and his eyes had a vacant look. I purposely asked a dumb question, and he just answered, didn’t snap at me.
One day in late November, I was raking the last of fall leaves from the garden when Ethan came up without a word and crooked his finger, come! At least he seemed back to his asshole self. He led me to The Backroom and unlocked it. I’d been there for private audiences with Karl. It had never been locked.
Ethan pointed in. I entered, and he closed the door. The fine leather chairs, in fact all the furniture was gone. A single candle sat flickering on the floor. I could feel the cold oozing from the stone wall. I instinctively moved closer to the fireplace, though there was no fire in the hearth. I waited, resisting the impulse to clutch myself for warmth. It wouldn’t do to have Karl catch me doing that.
The door eased open, and Karl silently crept in. He sat cross-legged on the floor, gesturing for me to join him. He carried two cups of tea and offered one to me. “It’s cold in here. Drink.”
Steam was pouring off his mug, but mine was lukewarm. How odd. How unlike Karl. He was the model for our compulsive neatness, attention to the tiniest detail. Though he dressed simply, his jeans fit him like they were tailored. He never spoke a word that wasn’t perfectly considered.
I sipped the tea, pretending it was hot, stealing glances up at that impassive face. When I’d drained it, he stood and without a word left, closing the door. At the snick of a key in the lock I shuddered, wincing to suppress any sign of fear from my face, though no one was there to see.
The candle had a few inches remaining, but it was going fast. If Karl was clear about anything, it was that the way in to the spirit was through the senses. So he commanded: listen, look, smell. I tried to attend to the sensations of that moment: the dull ache of cold seeping into my legs from the floor, the guttering candle casting jittery shadows on the wall, puffs of icy air from the flue. What was the point of having a fireplace with no fire on a bitter day like today? I tamped the angry thought down.
As the flame sputtered, then snuffed out, and the room pitched into blackness, I felt a new sensation. Or rather, an old one. My last coherent thought was that I’d been wrong. Karl had been quite precise with the tea. He’d known that LSD destabilizes in hot water.
Moments later, I knew I was in the clutches of a bigger dose than I’d ever taken. There was some ugly tinge to the experience that told me it had been mixed with something else—I kept thinking strychnine.
I couldn’t see my hand before my face, but the room wasn’t black for long. Soon it was drowning in colors. Terrible colors.
Strains of nasal Tibetan chanting seeped into the room, and I was a hermit in a cave in the Himalayas, my beard down to my knees, shivering in the icy blasts from a glacier above. Now it was monotonal Gregorian chants, and I cowered in my cell in a Cistercian Monastery in the south of France, the mistral howling through chinks in the stones. Where was this music coming from? From the chimney of course, like that imaginary wind.
Ray stopped. He couldn’t go any further into this memory. He’d never believed horror stories of acid flashbacks, but that trip had been so intense, so insane, that to write it, even to remember it, would be to risk going back. And maybe never returning. He cut to the end.
Eons later, a sound shattered the silence. My head jerked towards it, and a spear of light pierced the darkness. What? Only the door creeping open. I knew I’d been there a long time because my thirst had reached an existential urgency. My mouth was dry, rough, and furred like the lath in the plaster walls. I was certain that if I parted my lips my tongue would clatter to the floor.
I must have been starting to come down, though with such an immense distance to go it was hard to say. To eyes accustomed to pitch black, the light was blinding. A massive figure approached, carrying a candle, a blanket, a warm smile. That expression was so rare on his face that I wasn’t sure it was him. Though who else could it be?
My first impulse was to grab that drink and down it. My second was to embrace him. Then I remembered him saying, “No man touches me.” So I just sat there.
He set the candle on the floor. I realized I’d been shivering for hours, and tried to hide it, but it was beyond my control. He draped the blanket over my shoulders, dropped to cross-legged before me, and handed me the water.
“Careful, sip.”
The cool wetness touched my tongue, and I felt immense gratitude. As he spoke, I ignored his words, just let that voice wash over me, soothing, healing.
A moment later, something very different rose up in me. A great reservoir of those “negative emotions” had been steadily filling in the years since coming to The House. Not a drop of it had ever been released. It had just been topped off by a waking nightmare.
As if on their own accord, my cracked lips parted, and the feeling spilled out. “But why? Why this?” I immediately wished I could take the words back. I’d instinctively looked away from him as I spoke, but now I felt something and glanced at his face.
I shrunk back, almost falling over. His mouth was filled with sharp teeth, and his eyes were dark pits with hungry fires at the bottom. I remembered his silent, silken step. Behind his elegant mask, Karl Maxwell was a craven predator, pitiless and remorseless. Deadly. A big, black cat.
All this time he’d been wearing a mask
. It had slipped for an instant and I’d seen the true face behind it. Even as I thought those thoughts, he dropped the mask on again, smiling. And he was talking again, droning on.
I witnessed myself split into two. One part continued to lap up his voice. I could feel it reaching into my head, rearranging my thoughts, telling me he was good and kind. That this man was goodness and kindness itself. I ignored the fact that he was responsible for my being in that black nightmare room—he’d saved me! I owed him my life.
The second part stood aside from those thoughts, as though a stranger thought them. This part had seen that ravenous feline. And it would never forget.
It was a couple of days before I was fully free of the effects of the drug. The part of me that had seen the real Karl retreated into the shadows. I resumed my outer posture of worshipping Karl. And the inner posture, too, except that now I looked at him with a new wariness.
I felt like I wasn’t alone. As we disappeared one by one into The Backroom, returning with that vacant look, the group as a whole seemed to grow paler. It was like The Backroom was sucking the life from us. But maybe I was just projecting.
Ray came back to the present. His face was hot, his lips pressed tight. Before he could change his mind, he emailed Lou what he’d written. He headed home. The rain had stopped. Ragged clouds flew above, chased by a bitter wind that smelled of snow.
He sprawled in his chair in the gallery and called Lorraine. “Are you busy?”
“Just got out of a session. You sound upset.”
“Yeah, well, you remember the Backroom?”
“Oh.”
Her voice had gotten small, and he suspected he already had the answer to his next question. “Did he ever take you in there and…”
“Slip a mega-dose of acid on me? That motherfucker. Some things are unforgivable. I still kind of have flashbacks when I’m stressed or get really tired.”
Never Speak: A Mystery Thriller (The Murderous Arts Series) Page 15