The turbulence churned Jack’s mind. The Clear themselves were undergoing strange fluctuations. It was difficult to see them as distinct, human entities. They were linked male/female, male/female, but the yin and the yang of it seemed to shift. Picking a single individual, Jack could not with any certainty settle on that individual’s sex. Male/female seemed to stutter like a winking neon sign, a this-that image that refused resolution.
Drugs? Jack wondered, remembering Dorian Greenway’s chemical skills. Something in the air, skin-permeable, that altered his perception?
Jack hoped it was so—and was fairly certain it wasn’t.
As Jack watched, one of The Clear detached himself/herself from the others (who instantly relinked) and dove, headfirst, into the raging waters. Jack felt his heart stutter. The cult member did not surface and—again, was it altered perception?—the rising blood cloud seemed to thicken like the smoke from a campfire when a new log is thrown on the flames.
Jack saw something move to his left and turning, saw that Martin had slung the shotgun back over his shoulder and was climbing down a metal ladder. His hat was long gone, snatched by the storm, and his long overcoat flapped wildly.
A sudden shriek of organ chords, blasting from speakers high in the walls, added to the machine din. Wide double doors just to the right of the horror-film stone god flew open. Dorian Greenway and his entourage made their grand entrance. The cult leader was wearing a tuxedo. He was flanked by male members of The Clear dressed in their traditional shirt, tie, slacks and gleaming shoes. They moved sedately, in time to the howl of the wedding march which, despite its speaker-rattling volume, was muffled and blown into near incoherence by the machine-raging roar and buffeting winds.
Dorian moved to the side of the doors and waited with his honor guard. A second group entered, women in black. There were eight of them, four on either side of a gurney upon which some shimmering, rectangular object lay. In stately accord with the howling march, they guided the gumey into the room.
They joined Dorian and his group and all stood frozen, poised and waiting for the next cue.
Elsewhere, frenzy prevailed. The ranks of The Clear were rapidly thinning as, in twos and threes, they hurled themselves into the water. The water in the pool seemed to levitate. The whole room was growing dark. In the thick of the black foam, savage bolts of lightning skittered. Rubbery black tentacles, adorned with silver, rune-etched rings, rose and fell. One appendage swept the edge of the pool, tumbling a dozen pale bodies into the maelstrom.
“Let’s see if we can shut this circus down!” Ed Tilman shouted. Jack jumped. He’d forgotten the old man. Ed had come up behind Jack and hollered in his ear, and Jack had nearly pitched over the railing.
Recovering himself, he shouted back, “What about Martin?” Jack pointed below to where Martin Pendleton was striding purposely around the pool toward Dorian Greenway.
“That John Wayne style ain’t gonna get it,” Tilman said. “The straight-on macho shit doesn’t address the situation. We got a goddam hurricane in a gym, air swimming with blood and hallucinogens, we got a monster in a swimming pool, we got naked cult people feeding themselves to said monster, we got that lunatic in a tuxedo primed for some ceremony that is not gonna be pleasant, we got that sweet girl, buck naked and frozen in a block of ice, we got—”
Jack turned, clutching the rail. Dorian’s male contingent had removed the object from the gurney and placed it upright while Jack’s attention was focused elsewhere.
Kerry Beckett, in a dazzle of flesh, stood encased in a glittering block of ice. Her hands were at her sides, her eyes open. She was not standing perfectly straight, but tilted to the left. She must have been frozen while lying down. Perhaps two inches of ice separated her toes from the floor.
The ice was translucent, milky-white in places, and the effect was artful—more Playboy than Hustler.
“God!” Jack moaned.
“She’s a looker, all right,” Ed said. “Come on.”
Jack followed Ed as he ran along the catwalk. “Where are we going?” Jack shouted.
Ed didn’t respond. He ran with a crouched, arthritic gait, an old geezer waving a gun, running in baggy brown polyester pants and natty two-tone shoes and a goofy bow tie—surely not the man to trust in a crisis—and Jack followed, scared, confused, and hoping that appearances were deceiving.
Ed had come to a door in the wall, found it locked, and now waited for Jack to catch up. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY the sign read.
“We want to find the heart and stop it!” Tilman shouted. “Give me your revolver.”
“Huh?”
“Give me your revolver.” He snatched it from Jack’s hand, gave Jack the automatic. “The safety’s off, so don’t be shooting your dick off.” Ed directed Jack to get behind him, and Ed extended the revolver, aiming point-blank at the lock. He turned his head away. “Authorized Personnel only,” he said. “Well, here’s your authorization.” He fired twice and the door popped open. He grinned at Jack, pleased with himself. “Ed Tilman ain’t lost his touch,” he said.
They entered a cold stairwell. The thundering roar of engines pummeled Jack as he followed his manic leader.
“Okay, okay,” Tilman chanted as they raced down flights of stairs. “Okay, okay, okay.”
The noise could grow no louder, Jack thought. And then Tilman kicked open the door at the bottom of the stairs and they were in a room of black machinery. Jack had half a second to note winking red lights, pumping pistons, a reek of burning oil, a mind-defying roar as though Zeus and Yahweh, the both of them composed of steel and steam, were trading punches at ground zero. A young man, wearing muffled earphones as protection against the din, stood up, the magazine falling from his knees, grabbed for something—and Ed Tilman shot him, the bullet opening his throat, banging him in a heap against the door, bright blood flooding his shirt. The dead man slipped slowly to the right and sprawled across the machine gun.
Tilman, wasting no time, was already past the slumped guard and through the door of the room he’d been guarding.
The room was small, dimly lit, filled with antiseptic hospital smells. A bank of video monitors lined one wall.
A hospital bed dominated the room, facing the wall of flickering monitors. A red-faced dwarf was propped up in the bed, his eyes small, white, and sightless, his lips purple and swollen. His skin was netted with wrinkles; even his scalp, visible though a fuzz of thin white hair, was crisscrossed with tiny lines.
Two IVs dripped fluids into the paralyzed body. To the bed’s right a shelf of monitors beeped and blinked, monitoring vital signs. Moving closer, Jack saw that a small silver box, the size of a cigarette lighter, appeared to be stuck to the dwarf’s right temple. Wires radiated from this box, stapled into his flesh, one traveling like a scar down the right side of his face to disappear behind his ear, several traveling down his chest. Other wires led off the bed, presumably to power sources or monitoring equipment.
Jack saw something move, jumped, saw that it was his own reflection in the standing mirror next to the bed, a mirror framed with small lightbulbs like yellow ping-pong balls.
Jack turned his attention back to the man on the bed. The man looked dead, not just dead but long dead, dead-with-the-pyramids dead. Maybe he had been taller ten thousand years ago, but now, standing, he’d be about three and a half feet, judging from where his feet punched up the blanket. Dead. The short and the dead. Like the Bible says.
Jack felt he was losing it, driven mad by an accumulation of surreal moments.
Ed Tilman was circling the room. He turned and shouted to Jack. “Control central. This is it. So who’s running the store? Sure isn’t—”
She must have been crouched down behind the bed and the nightstand, although there hardly seemed enough room. In any event, the sound of the bedside lamp crashing to the floor, the sound of a metal pan cartwheeling and coming to rest with a dying, tinny wobble, the sound of the nightstand slamming on its side... these sounds traile
d the oof! Ed Tilman uttered as she tackled him, head-butting his stomach, knocking him into the wall.
Jack watched, stunned, as Ed struggled with a short, wide woman in a nurse’s uniform, white stockings, white canvas shoes, the whiteness a blur to eyes wide-focused for the murky light. There was enough light to see that she was a substantial woman, easily two hundred pounds. Jack could not see her face. Her hair was cropped short, her head and neck a seamless bullet shape tucked efficiently between broad shoulders.
Ed Tilman and his assailant spun, locked together, her hand clenched around the wrist that held the revolver. The revolver smashed through a monitor’s face. Both hands, bloody, her hand still glued to his wrist, resurfaced, dripping shattered glass onto the floor. One shard of glass glinted from the base of her thumb. The revolver was gone from Tilman’s hand.
Jack saw her other arm swing, high and wide, a southpaw’s fastball delivery, bringing the syringe down. Tilman raised his arm to fend off the blow, and the needle stuck into his forearm then snapped, and he stepped forward and slammed his elbow into her nose, and she staggered back, shaking her head, and stumbled against the broken monitor. Her small eyes were pale blue, innocent of all expression, dumbfounded, dazed, her mouth slightly open, a mustache of blood forming over her thin upper lip.
Later, Jack was to understand what a consummate professional she was, how skillful this semblance of confusion.
Thrown against the broken monitor, her right hand had been bounced back, lost again in the jagged maw of the broken picture tube. This was a calculated maneuver. She came up with the revolver in her hand. She pointed the gun at Tilman’s head and smiled.
Jack shot her twice. That is, two bullets entered her body. The first bullet entered her chest, an inch below her name tag (BENDERS), the second destroyed her left eye. A stream of bullets found other targets, taking out two more monitors and shattering various pieces of electronic equipment. This was an extremely automatic automatic.
Ed Tilman took the gun from him after Jack thought to relax his trigger finger.
“You want a lighter touch,” Ed said. “Although I am not complaining.”
Jack didn’t say anything. He leaned back against the wall, found he was sitting on the floor.
“You just rest there,” he heard Ed saying. “I’m going to see about turning stuff off.” Ed retrieved the revolver, stuffed it in his belt, and then went to sit in front of the computer banks.
The noise died slowly around Jack, machines spiraling into silence, some refusing to go gracefully, hissing and shrieking, others uttering a last, desperate rat-scramble scrape and sigh.
“Ah,” Tilman’s voice said. “Well, well, well. Well, fuck me.”
Jack closed his eyes and concentrated on not throwing up. Time passed, in queasy, single-file seconds.
Ed Tilman clutched his arm. “No rest for the wicked,” he said. “We got to gather the troops and get. I seem to have started a countdown. It’s not entirely clear what is being counted down, but I got a feeling about these guys, and my guess is we don’t want to be around when that last zero winks. Looks like we got fifteen minutes.”
Jack stood up. He was shaky, but no longer sick. He blinked at the dwarf on the bed, blinked at the blind eyes, the monitors that no longer beeped and blinked.
“We shut down his life support,” Jack said.
Ed turned and joined Jack in regarding the open-mouthed, impossibly ancient husk. “You are saying we killed the Mummy?” Ed shrugged. “Okay. I can live with that. You got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Besides, this guy should have hung with a nicer crowd. You play with snakes, you are apt to get snakebit. Rest in peace, old-timer.”
Ed steered Jack out of the room.
Ed stooped and snatched up the machine gun. “Here we go,” he said, and they headed back up the stairs.
They came out on the catwalk again and blinked down at the altered scene.
The room was empty, the pool devoid of water. A red-black rectangle lay at the bottom of the empty pool, like a coffin in some nightmare mausoleum.
They climbed down the metal ladder and ran across the gymnasium floor, the soles of their shoes making pocking noises on the sticky, resinous surface.
Don’t thinkabout the blood, Jack thought. Bad advice. His stomach churned.
“Kerry!” he shouted. The hollow room took the name and shook it and gave back nothing.
Jack found the ladder down to the bottom of the swimming pool and began to descend.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Tilman shouted after him.
Jack reached the concrete floor, turned, and slipped. He managed to break his fall with his left hand, palm skidding across the slick surface. His left knee banged the floor, pain filling it like air rushing into a vacuum. Trembling, Jack stood and limped onward, leaning into the fear as though it were a strong wind.
The block of ice was imperfectly coated with red-black blood, and he knelt, reached out his hand, wiped away the blood, and saw her face, the blue eyes as empty as a cloudless sky, her flesh pale, frosted and strangely translucent.
“Kerry!”
He seemed to be shouting across a canyon, across death itself, that bridgeless expanse.
A roaring, ravenous sound broke overhead, and he looked up and saw flames boiling from the ceiling, saw dark girders appear magically. The air was suddenly heated, fogged with smoke.
Ed Tilman’s face, full of upside-down concern, peered over the pool’s edge. “We got to be going,” he said.
Not without Kerry.
He turned back to her. The block of ice was melting, so rapidly that Jack could see it dwindle. It appeared, in fact, to be sinking into the floor. Kerry would be released; he would carry her to safety. Perhaps she was not...
Kerry remained encased in the ice, was, herself—no, yes—melting. The strange translucence of her features had increased; she was a ghost, fading, the floor beneath her visible. She was an indentation, a shimmer-shape painted on a crystal mold.
The wetness of her retreat soaked Jack’s clothing. Two inches of ice, now shed of its blood-veneer, revealed her whole body, perfect and ephemeral, sinking, disappearing.
And she was gone. Jack’s hands slapped at the pool of water that remained, the heat around him a swollen, evil halitosis of despair. He sought her, crazy, clawing the already tepid water, breaking his fingernails on the chalky concrete. His palm slapped something round and thin; he closed it in his fist.
A hand clutched his shoulder; he turned and saw Tilman leaning over him. “Come on,” Tilman said. “There’s nothing you can do here.”
The Hollywood god was on fire, the flames revealing the steehwire frame and the true nature of the simulated stone (paper and glue). Skeletal tentacles writhed as though in agony, animated by blazing paper skin.
It was toppling toward them as they fled through the double doors. In the hall, they almost fell over the recumbent form of Martin Pendleton.
He lay on his back, his coat spread out like a stain beneath him. Crumpled against the opposite wall was a member of The Clear, arm nearly detached at the shoulder where the shotgun blast had caught him.
“Give me a hand,” Ed said, slipping an arm behind Martin’s back. “He’s alive.”
As though to confirm this, the director of New Way groaned, then coughed and sat up convulsively.
“Easy,” Tilman said. “Can you stand?” Blood was flowing from Martin’s forehead and from another cut on his cheek. He stood up, stumbled, and Tilman caught him. Jack came up, took Martin’s left arm and steadied him.
They lurched down the hallway, which was filling with smoke. In front of them, a wall of flames rose. Heat bruised Jack’s face. He gasped and stepped back, bumping a door that swung open on salvation.
The cellar.
“Here!” Tilman had already seen. With Martin between them, they retreated down the stairs.
They needed no flashlight this time. The cellar was illuminated by burning rafters.
Jack stared out the van’s window and coughed. He watched flames sprout from the mansion’s roof. A window was suddenly illuminated. Glass shattered. A gable collapsed, a red lattice tumbling earthward.
A muffled whump made the van shudder and the mansion’s front door ripped from its hinges and spun, flames billowing in its wake.
“We’re out of here,” Tilman said, turning the key in the ignition.
Jack turned and saw Martin, who was sitting up, staring at the burning mansion. New Way’s director said, “Sonsofbitches,” and wiped the blood from his forehead with his coat sleeve.
Jack felt his knee bite him, winced. The object in his hand vibrated as his fist tightened around it. He opened his fist and blinked at the silver coin. Words circled a silver sunburst: ONE DAY AT A TIME.
He was holding the medallion that Kerry had picked up at that first AA meeting they had attended together. A desire chip, the chairman had called it.
Desire.
A week later, back at New Way, engaged in the mechanical process of continuing, of participating in the numbing, pointless process of group therapy, Jack held the desire chip in his hand, felt it vibrate, and thought of Kerry.
Young girls did not melt into nothingness; he knew that. He had, he supposed, hallucinated her image in the ice. Something, some chemical, had been floating in the air, something that briefly altered his perception.
So why didn’t he believe that? Why was he convinced that Kerry had, indeed, melted away before his eyes?
Group went on. They sat in a circle, Eunice on the sofa with Wesley Parks, the others perched on flimsy folding chairs (designed, perhaps, to stress the uncertainty of life, the necessity of coming clean before the whole shaky business collapsed).
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