“Will they just let us go in and get him?” It was Kerry’s voice, the first she had been heard from in some time, and Jack peered into the darkness of the van. He couldn’t make out her features, saw only the cloudy tangle of her hair. She sounded scared.
“Only the Lord knows what they’ll do,” Martin said.
Eunice spoke up then, perhaps in response to what was said, perhaps not. “Jesus don’t want no part of this,” she said.
The storm began to ease off. The flakes that fell grew tentative, lost bravado as their ranks thinned. You could see the road under the whiteness. It wasn’t freezing; this stuff wouldn’t stay long.
That was fine for tomorrow, but Jack wasn’t happy with the moment. The van slid down the road like a refrigerator down a ski slope. Martin Pendleton didn’t seem to notice that the vehicle he was operating was more or less out of control.
Amid stomach-lurching swoops, Jack saw them tumbling off the road, dead a dozen times as they rolled end over end down the embankment and then belly-flopped into some icy farm pond for another helping of cold-water death.
For a man with an anxious and brooding temperament, an imagination is never an asset.
Jack tried to distract himself.
“That meeting we were just in,” Jack said. “Did you find anything unusual about it?”
Martin turned and looked at Jack. “How so?”
“Well, I know every meeting, every AA group, has a slightly different feel.”
Martin was nodding. “Yeah?”
“Well. How did that one strike you?”
Martin pursed his lips. “I guess I’m a little set in my ways. I don’t hold with change, and you’re right, that meeting has changed since I first went there.”
“Ah.”
“A meeting will change so slowly that you hardly notice it. Touchy-feely therapy stuff can come in and infect a group before you know it. Hard truths will get lost. Old-timers will stop telling newcomers that they are idiots—in some sort of misguided attempt to be gentle. And I don’t hold with that inner-child stuff, and reading poems. I reckon they call it pop psychology because it’s a balloon of hot air that you could pop with a pin prick.”
“I wasn’t thinking so much on those lines...”
“Any meeting that you are not used to seems a little strange. Likely you will have to adjust to country ways.”
“Well,” Jack said, “I was thinking specifically of the curious foreign language that several people spoke. And the mention of deities that don’t seem to be Christian-based, and the wall slogans which weren’t your traditional—”
“Huh. Didn’t notice that. Here we are.”
Pendleton had stopped the van with the engine still running. He leaned back and spoke to his passengers. “I thought of having you folks wait here while Jack and I went up to the house, but I had time to think about that on the way out here, and I think it’s a show of solidarity that we’re wanting. Think of this as your first twelfth-step call, going out and helping a suffering alcoholic.”
“Wesley Parks ain’t no damn alkyholic!” Gates said.
“The man can’t help that,” Martin said. “He may not have a clinical excuse for being an asshole, but he’s a human being nonetheless, and I would appreciate it if all of you would close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine that you are caring individuals.”
It had stopped snowing, but the world beyond the warmth of the van didn’t seem inviting. No one shouted, All right, let’s go. What are we waiting for1 Our beloved alcoholism counselor needs us. Ed Tilman may, in fact, have been voicing the sentiments of others when he broke the silence, saying, “They wouldn’t be pulling shit like this at Betty Ford’s. We wouldn’t be playing SWAT team in a stinking snowstorm, getting ready to kick down a door and yank some counselor’s bacon out of the fire. We’d be sitting on sofas, maybe sharing our feelings, maybe watching an old Star Trek episode on TV, laughing and punching each other on the shoulder, bonding. What I mean to say is, we’d be doing things covered by insurance.”
Al had thoughts on all this. “I think if we get Wesley Parks out of this, it should count for something with the law,” he said. “Like, we should get rehab diplomas immediately, and something in writing saying all charges are dropped—if, you know, you got charges pending—and maybe—”
“Humpf,” Martin said. He climbed out, turned and pulled the shotgun from under the seat. Jack sighed and prepared to get out himself. He saw the keys still dangling from the van’s ignition switch, and he leaned across the seat, snatched the keys, and stuffed them into his pocket as he backed out.
“Where we supposed to be going?” Gates said. Everyone was standing outside the van, the lot of them looking like ragged extras in a budget disaster movie. Kerry, a blue windbreaker flung over her shoulders, was hunched forward, as though the weight of the cast was finally a force to be reckoned with. Her eyes were colorless; her features painted with fatigue.
Jack went to her. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She looked up. She opened her mouth, and Jack saw her let the impulse to say something cruel die on her tongue. “Sure,” she said. “I’m a little shaky, that’s all. And I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“Me too,” Jack said. He moved closer. “Our leader may be crazy, you know. He’s wielding a shotgun and preparing to kick down a cult leader’s door. He may have never heard of Waco. I think we would be within our rights to mutiny.”
Kerry blinked, not comprehending.
Jack took his hand out of his pocket and showed her the keys. “I’ve got the keys to the van,” he said. “I snagged them when I got out. We could let everyone set off on this crusade and we could fall back, get out of here, get to a telephone and get some genuine help...”
“Just leave them here?” Kerry said. She raised an eyebrow.
Well, Jack thought, I’ve animated her features. I’ve brought life back into her eyes.
It was angry life. She glared at him—and deftly snatched the keys from his hand. “I think Martin’s right,” she said. “I think we have to get to Wesley right now. We don’t have time to run away and call up the cavalry Martin’s right about that. I think he’s wrong about you, though.”
“Ah?” Jack said.
“I don’t think there’s a better Jack Lowry underneath. No, I think what you see is what you get.”
She turned her back on Jack and walked quickly to where Martin was standing.
Her shoulders were straight again, braced with censure.
Jack caught up with them as they walked up the gravel driveway. He hoped that Kerry would notice he had joined them, but she didn’t look back.
The drive was flanked by oaks still retaining most of their leaves. Jack looked up, saw that every ancient tree trunk was yearning toward the lopsided moon. The silvery moon was full of that cold, arbitrary quality that was life’s main ingredient and it frightened Jack.
Main ingredient. The main ingredient of life... how had Sara said it? They had been talking about Sara’s first love, astronomy, about the vast, empty distances that separated stars, the ample space between electrons, the blooming vacuum in everything. Building block. That’s how Sara had put it. “The building block of the universe is nothing,” she had said.
Who could argue with that?
The drive curved slowly to the left and then, impressively, a mansion presented itself. Gothic? Was that the adjective? Jack was no student of architecture. Had Nathaniel Hawthorne encountered this house, there would have been no stopping him. Eves, gables, spires, towers... ten thousand words to take the wind out of a schoolboy’s sails and send him fleeing from literature and into the arms of math and computer science and other less boring—and more lucrative—disciplines.
Gothic?
It certainly inspired lurid description as it crouched on the hill, a black, bristling, spiky edifice of wood and stone and concrete. Some dark gray stone was the main ingredient, and mental illness seemed to be the theme.
>
The mansion was melodramatically grotesque. And... I’ve seen this house before, Jack thought. That was crazy. Where could he have seen it. Yes, and there was a full moon behind it, and a girl got a bat caught in her hair and her boyfriend said, “Hey, it’s only a bat.”
“No,” Gates was saying. “I don’t think so. I’ll wait here. You all take your time, don’t hurry on my account.”
And the audience laughed, Jack thought.
“It was built—altered, actually—for a movie,” Martin said. “A comedy, one of those horror comedies that thirteen-year-old boys think are funny, people’s heads blowing up, zombies catching fire, eyeballs melting, real first-rate laugh fodder for morons. I can’t recall the name. Later a millionaire named Ezra Coldwell bought the place. Harken folks have plenty of stories about Ezra; he was a notorious drunk, and always boiling with resentments. He hated everyone by the time he went mad—maybe bile destroyed his brain—and they shipped him down to the nut ward in Staunton. Next thing everyone knew, a lot more buildings were going up on the property and now Harken’s the headquarters for The Clear.”
“I saw that movie,” Jack said. No one paid any attention to this remark.
“I ain’t going any closer,” Gates said. “My entire curiosity is satisfied right here.”
“Suit yourself,” Martin said. “Rumor has it there are some pretty mean-tempered guard dogs roaming the grounds, so you’ll want to look sharp, standing out here by your lonesome. The rest of us, we are going to go on in and introduce ourselves.”
“Hey,” Gates said, grudgingly accompanying the others, unhappy with his options. “I know this here shotgun-toting fellow is crazy, but what about the rest of you? We ain’t been invited here, you know. Might be they will shoot first and ask questions later.”
But they moved on.
Martin held the shotgun at his side, barrel pointing at the welcome mat, and rang the doorbell. Jack could hear the bell echoing within, a dolorous tolling that suggested vast, empty rooms and long, cold hallways.
The mat at Jack’s feet was inscribed, red letters on the gray, stubbled surface:
WELCOME
All pilgrims to R’yleh’s Portal
Wza-y’ei! Wza-y’ei!
Martin rang the bell again.
“No one home,” Gates said. “Guess we’ll have to come back some other time.”
Martin turned the doorknob (an elaborate brass fixture, two lizards— dragons?—locked in combat). The door swung open.
The room was large and dark, illuminated by several ornate wall lamps that created pale islands in the gloom. To their left, a wide, carpeted stairway rose majestically into grainy darkness.
Jack looked at the carpet beneath his feet and staggered, his mind jostled into vertiginous panic by the conviction that the dark patches in the pattern were empty space, the blackness of a pit. The pattern itself had seemed, for a moment, a nest of thick-bodied serpents, green, brown, yellow, that formed an evil, undulating grid.
This was not so, of course. His feet were firmly planted on a carpet whose intricate design was nonrepresentational, no snakes at all.
Jack lifted his eyes from the carpet. To his right, a large sofa, Victorian in aspect and upholstered in some floral pattern, squatted in front of a wall of books, shelf after shelf of leather-bound volumes, their bindings scuffed and discolored by age.
“Hello!” Martin shouted. “Hello!” His voice drifted away, an absentminded ghost.
“Come on,” Martin said, moving into the room. Jack followed, reluctantly. The others came too, fear creating a skittish platoon.
“Visitors!” The voice came from overhead. “I thought I heard the bell, but sometimes I hear it when it isn’t ringing, and I really didn’t think anyone would be dropping by in such inclement weather.”
Jack turned and watched the man descending the stairs, one hand lightly on the banister, dramatic, slightly effeminate, an ingenue’s entrance. A young man, Jack thought, but then revised upward. Middle-aged but boyish, this man was very pale and wore the obligatory white shirt, tie, dress slacks and polished shoes. Apparently, there was no casual dress for members of The Clear.
“I’m Dorian Greenway,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white and even. “And you...” He held up a hand, pale palm outward. “No, don’t tell me. I much prefer to guess. The shotgun and the lateness of the hour would suggest that you are the village mob come to slay Frankenstein’s monster. But, if that’s the case, where are your torches? I really must insist that you bring torches if you wish to present yourselves as a proper mob.”
“We didn’t have time for the torches,” Martin said. “One of our members got himself kidnapped, and we came directly.”
Dorian Greenway opened his mouth, widened his eyes, and sat down on a carpeted step in a parody of shock. “Well. I do know you. You are Martin Pendleton, the man at the helm of an alcoholism treatment center called New Way—although, let’s be honest here, there’s nothing particularly new about your methods out at New Way. Distressingly archaic, I’m afraid.”
“We’ve come for Wesley Parks.”
Dorian nodded. “Yes, he’s here.” Dorian turned to regard Jack. “If people want to come here, we welcome them. We had a friend of yours recently, I think. You were sitting on the steps together.” Jack was sweating under the man’s scrutiny. “What was that young man’s name? Pickle? Winkle? A very excitable person, I remember that. Very impressionable. He had some conversations with my uncle about demons and such—not actual conversations, of course; poor Ezra hasn’t spoken a word in years. Anyway, I think your friend took my uncle too literally. That happens. Then we have incidents.” Dorian sighed. “And who do you think gets blamed? We are scapegoats, every time. Take your friend, Wesley Parks. Frankly, I can’t see why you’ve bothered coming out here in this frightful weather for Mr. Parks. He’s not one of us, you know.” Dorian Greenway leaned forward, hands rubbing his knees, and whispered, “He’s not an alcoholic.”
“Yes. I know.”
Dorian shrugged, standing up. “I don’t think civilians should be involved.” He reached into his pocket, casually pulled out a black shiny object and raised it to his lips. It was, Jack saw, an inhaler, like the epinephrine inhalers used by asthma sufferers.
Dorian squeezed the black inhaler, filling his lungs. His dark eyes widened. He put the inhaler back in his pocket. He ran his hands through his short-cropped, dark hair.
“Only those who have been damned in the great Rift, only those with the K’n Yan-imprint, acquired genetically or by astral accident, will have the self-interest required to be soldiers in the Unraveling. So...” He smiled. “I’ve taken the liberty of enlightening Wesley Parks. If he is going to play the game, he should understand the consequences.”
Martin Pendleton raised his shotgun. “I’m not following you. And, like they say, that’s okay. Guess I was never much of a follower. If you could fetch Parks, we’ll be on our way.”
Dorian Greenway’s manner changed. He stood up, a hand to his brow. He was visibly shaking, and when he spoke, his voice trembled. “I hope you are not threatening me,” he said. “Because this is not about me or you. It is much, much bigger than that. We are at the center of it, here in Harken. We are a tiny anomaly, just a loose thread in the fabric. But that’s changing; pluck at this thread and soon, soon it will unravel. An ancient conflict will be resolved, for good or ill.”
Jack saw movement in the corner of his eye and turning, saw that men— and women, the first he had seen of The Clears female contingent—had entered and stood against the walls in silence. The women wore black dresses that came to their ankles. The men were dressed like their leader. Their arms were at their sides, hands linked, men and women creating a placid, bovine chain.
The effect was unsettling and Jack was fervently wishing he were elsewhere, wishing he hadn’t let Kerry snatch the van’s keys, hadn’t let her shame him into accompanying Martin and the others.
“We come into the
world not evil, but hollow,” Dorian said. “This hollowness is what calls us to the other side. It is the thing we call love that binds us, the curse and the blessing of attraction.”
“This is fascinating,” Martin said, “but the hour’s late. You’ll have to fill me in on Armageddon later. I know you fellows always have some end-of-the-world story, and I’d love to hear it before you drink your poisoned Koob Aid. But right now—”
“The Elders wept!” Dorian said, suddenly standing up, walking directly toward Martin.
“Easy,” Martin said, but Dorian walked past him and stood in front of Kerry.
Dorian dropped to his knees with a gasp, reached up and caught her hand. He stared at her face, enthralled. “It’s you,” he said. “Here I have been thinking to myself lately, Dorian, you say your prayers and nothing comes of it. Such a meager portion of faith have I had.” He shook his head. “You are... you are the image of her. This means... it means we can alter this tired cycle, we can...” He leaned forward—and licked the palm of her hand.
“Hey,” Kerry said, pulling her hand away, frowning.
Dorian stood. “Ah,” he said. Jack saw that the man was sweating visibly, his forehead beaded with glistening droplets, an amphetamine madness hissing in his eyes. Whatever that inhaler contained, it was doing its work. “How could you stand in this room and I not know it? We will forge a new cycle.”
“Back off,” Martin said, nudging Dorian with the shotgun.
Oh Jesus, Jack thought. Don’t poke this madman with a shotgun. Please don’t do that.
But Dorian blinked, turned, and smiled at Martin. “Certainly,” he said. “I’m out of line. I can’t expect this glorious girl to understand her destiny. What has been instantly revealed to me, must come to her in the fullness of time.” Dorian turned to Kerry. “What is your name, my little miracle?”
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