Deathgrip

by Brian Hodge

  Paul closed his eyes, sunk low in the seat. Couldn’t believe this discussion was taking place at all. Like it was no more than a few cable connections to make bad music with a garage band. The day was young and already his head was tired.

  “Think about it. Just think about it. For a friend?” Gabe took his eyes off the road for a long, imploring look. He looked ready to weep. Not from sadness, something else. Ambition? No, he looked close to … rapture? That was it.

  And did Paul like it, in some secret fold of his mind? Some pocket of loneliness and isolation? I shouldn’t. But I do.

  “Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’d be a big flop,” Gabe said. “But if it did, think of the potential. Think of what you could accomplish.”

  This was folly and flattery, and Paul knew he was beginning to nibble. But why not? If this offbeat idea worked, he could potentially reach more people in one telecast than in years of personal contact. And if it didn’t, the loss was negligible, a red face for everyone concerned.

  The voice of caution — What about the backfires, what about Popeye and Mrs. DeWitt, what about them? — merited little attention. That was just the doom crier having his petty say. The circumstances around Dawson Ministries were about as controlled as anyplace he had seen. Especially during the shows. It would not go wrong.

  “Paul, it’s time you moved up in the world. Donny knows it, and to be honest, I think you’ve got him a little scared. But not me. Because I see you for the miracle you are. I acknowledge that.” Gabe dropped one hand to his forearm and squeezed. Like a vise. “But it’s no reason why you and Donny can’t continue to work together for now. More as … equals? You have earned that right, just by the nature of who and what you are.”

  Paul squirmed in the seat, blushing. He’d never taken compliments with grace.

  But he supposed he could learn.

  Tuesday morning blues, the latest trend. When Monday just isn’t enough. Used to be, the trials of the world never penetrated Donny’s office door. Like a one-way valve, but no more, no more. Had he been mistaken all along, or had the rules changed? Now the worldly woes seemed to never leave.

  Dear Irv. Theirs had been a relationship of mutual benefits, financial mostly, later medical, and later still, spiritual. But one thing could not be ignored: Donny had called him a friend and had meant it in the highest sense of the word. And had never even told him.

  Life had been brutal of late. Looking out upon the faces of everyone who’d known and loved Irv Preston would be but one more bruising blow. The funeral was this afternoon. A lot of people would be looking to him for comfort, to stand tall in the pulpit and weave order like a loom — comfort from chaos, God’s will out of murder. A lot of them would surely be leaving empty of heart.

  What hunger to escape it all, walls on every side. Here the death of a friend, there the loss of the wife he’d always understood and cherished. Back at the house now, venomously applying herself to therapy. With her leg strapped inside a full-length brace, she was now managing a few shuffling footsteps between parallel bars. One giant step for Amanda, farther away from his life.

  And now the crown jewel of bad timing. Donny gazed down with muddled dread at the proposal on his desk. Neat and clean and free of typos, crisply produced on the laser printer in Gabe’s office, tidily bound in a clear blue folder. So fastidious, yet easily the silliest proposal Gabriel Matthews had ever come up with. What kind of agenda was he working on these days, anyway, and at a time when his stoic support was most needed?

  For once, it was going to be a pleasure to dispense bad news.

  He summoned Gabe via intercom.

  “Please, sit down.” Donny poked a finger toward a chair before the desk, and Gabe settled. “It’s about this proposal for switching to a live satellite broadcast.”

  Gabe’s face betrayed nothing. “You’ve read it already?”

  “I didn’t have to.” Donny flexed fingers, steepling them. “Because it’s out of the question.”

  A single twitch of one eye, then total control. “I have worked hard on this over the past few days.”

  “Don’t think I don’t appreciate that, but—”

  Then the most peculiar thing happened. Gabe’s head took over independently, began to shake endlessly back and forth. Talking all the while. “In fact, I’ve already got this under way.” Enumerating points finger by finger. “I’ve written a mailer to go out this week announcing it. Started negotiating for satellite time. I think I know how we can minimize reconstruction on the chapel—”

  “I said no, Gabe.”

  “—and I’ve outlined a plan for revamping our camera and technical crews.” Four fingers and holding, head still shaking.

  When does he SLEEP? Donny wondered. Or DOES he? He hasn’t heard a word I’ve said.

  “And this means nothing to you?” Finally, finally, stilling that nervous shake.

  Donny sighed and groped for his coffee mug to wet his throat. He had hoped this would be painless. “If you went to that much trouble, then you grossly exceeded your authority. To be perfectly honest, I’m disappointed by your presumptuousness.”

  “Oh no, oh no,” whispering, drumming his fingers on his armrest. Then, quite bold: “I was hoping you wouldn’t make this difficult.”

  “You had no right to go ahead with any of these plans. You had no right to bypass my approval, or that of the Board of Directors.” Donny could feel the hot flush creeping into his face, his scalp. “This is not some minor marketing ploy. Now call it off today. I run this show, in case you’ve forgotten!”

  Gabe scooted to the edge of his chair, grinning slyly, and good lord, the man was actually enjoying this, as if it were a game. A debate. “Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t switch to live.”

  Donny popped with sweat from crown to soles, and huffed his exasperation. “One good reason?” He yanked the proposal’s pages free of their binder and tossed them into the air, let them spill to the desk. “The cost, for starters, how about the cost! The uplink dish alone would run well over a million, and that’s just the beginning. Renovations, extra salaries for people who won’t come cheap. There’s satellite time to rent each and every week, tons more equipment apart from the dish. And what’s more, there’s not one indication that a format change like this would generate any increase in donations. Is that good enough for you?”

  A tiny smile hooked one corner of Gabe’s mouth. “The cost.”

  “Yes! The cost!” He pushed back for some deep breathing. Had to calm down, his heart was pounding as if he’d done twenty laps in the pool. He forced an even voice. “There’s no way I can justify that kind of expenditure.”

  Gabe lifted a single finger, cool as ice and twice as brittle, stepping for the door. “I’ll be right back. I want to get something from my office.”

  Donny rolled his eyes with a grimace, shoved his coffee away. Just how valuable was Gabe these days? High efficiency could justify putting up with only so much arrogance. And if Gabe was trying to assume undue control around here, then the time had come to consider letting him go. With poor references, to boot, thou shalt not lie.

  Gabe returned with a nine-by-twelve envelope in one hand and shut the door. Face like a stone icon as he slapped the envelope onto the spill of loose papers. He did not sit.

  Donny laboriously unfastened the clasp, whatever it was would change nothing, then slid the contents into a waiting hand, and—

  And he feared his heart would burst.

  “You can’t justify the cost?” Gabe said. “Then let’s see you try to justify these.”

  The room was pulsing in time with a sudden ferocious headache as all the bile and coffee in his stomach coagulated into lava. The beads of body sweat became chilly quagmires, fetid with panic. His only movement was purely involuntary: his trembling hands. No coherent thought, just the paralysis of an animal trapped in headlights, watching oncoming judgment.

  His hands were the first to free, as he flipped from one glossy color photo t
o the next. How, when…? No trouble identifying his own nude body, but it wasn’t until the fourth picture that he saw enough of the woman’s face to identify her.

  “That’s Edie Carson,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Two more, then they slipped from his hands, and he’d barely gotten into the stack. It wasn’t bad enough that they depicted him rolling about with a petite naked woman he had once covertly employed — the woman was obviously dead. He wanted to gag, felt a crawling sense of revulsion, sensing beneath his clothes where warm and cold flesh had pressed in intimate contact. What he was doing in those pictures was not merely depraved, it was unholy.

  Slowly, awareness began to expand. Edie, who had so unexpectedly disappeared, was dead. From the look of her neck — twisted so sharply cold dry mouth at his own — she hadn’t died of natural causes. Which meant her murderer was probably standing…

  In. This. Room.

  Donny looked up, and Gabe towered like an executioner.

  “I,” said Gabe, drawing the sound out forever, “have had a vision that has changed the course of my life. I … have come to touch something that has validated my entire existence. And you … are in the way. So there are going to be some changes around here…

  “I don’t care what things look like from the outside, you can play king of the ministry and stomp your feet across the stage all you want to. But don’t ever ever ever forget, behind the scenes, you are not the one in charge anymore. And you will give me blank checks to finance whatever I need to around here. Are you following me so far?”

  Photographic reprints in news magazines and tabloids flipped on rapid strobe through his mind. While home and ministry and compound and years of colossal effort (and the fortune don’t forget the money THE MONEY) went swirling down a toilet of scandal and legal nightmares. He saw his marriage fracture beyond all hope of repair.

  He nodded to Gabe. Novocaine numb.

  “And you will stay away from Paul Handler until I have what I want from him. And then? You can have this place back, all of it. Just like before I came along.”

  Donny found his voice inside a sour breath. “Money. I have money, I can pay you now. I can give you money.”

  Gabe shook his head. “I don’t want your money. I want my own salvation. I want to be free, finally. I want to touch … stars.”

  Donny understood none of it, understood only hard grim reality, which was more than enough. He sat. Feet of clay, ass of lead. He heard the sound of a zipper, of all things, and looked over to find Gabe unfastening his own slacks…

  “Look what you make me do to myself.”

  Donny was not a man given to gasping, but when Gabe tugged down his underwear to expose himself, the sight was so painfully ghastly, Donny couldn’t prevent it. Gabe’s scrotum, swollen the purple of bruises upon bruises, pinched together with some kind of metallic contraption.

  Gabe looked at him, tears beginning to unfurl down his cheeks as he bared himself in shameful display, like unworthy meat. “I was sent to you to investigate you. And God help me, a part of me came to love you, because you didn’t judge me and you accepted me. But you turned yourself into a whore. And you tore me apart inside. So look at me. You’re only now getting to see the truth.” He sucked in a sharp breath, choked down a little cry as he zipped himself up again. “We’ve both been living lies.”

  Donny could only utter a sick and hurtful croak.

  Gabe lingered at the door, hand on knob, and straightened. Putting on a new face, to blend in, make no ripples in the outer world. To keep it all buried in this office, a mausoleum of ugly secrets.

  “And please, Donny, get yourself together,” his voice changing abruptly, back to the executive assistant of old. The facade, the illusion. “You’ve got a funeral to do.”

  Gone.

  Funeral, Donny thought. Reduced to single words again. As the enormity of this morning’s hostile takeover sent his head onto the desk, to spill tears upon the weapon of his downfall. A bittersalt dew.

  And while he knew he would be unable to ever draw sufficient courage for the act, he nevertheless wondered just how big a sin suicide actually was.

  1982-1984/Scotland

  In the heart of desolation, The Quorum made renaissance men and women. An organization born in a different world, it had survived centuries of war, monarchs good and bad, and the decline of Roman Catholicism as the predominant guiding force of the western world.

  Entrenched in secrecy and built on a foundation of ancient myth and history, it had survived when the other orders born of the Crusades — the Knights Templars, the Knights of St. John, the Teutonic Knights — had not. And for one fundamental reason: Their purpose still existed. Scapegoats lived. This spiritual lineage of men and women who had but the merest inkling of what called their bodies home and demanded appeasement through them.

  The Quorum outlived its founders — Baron Walter of Kent and the Abbot Baldwin of Huntingdon’s Widdershank Abbey — in a manner neither of them could have foreseen. Established by papal dispensation, it was nevertheless unbeholden to the Church to the point of disavowal, and was more the creation of those in charge of it at the time.

  The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century proved the first true nail in the coffin of its leanings as a religious order. As well, society itself had been evolving in fits and starts toward a more enlightened age. The advent of a more secular world brought about a divestiture of church from state. A new breed of thinker was addressing the eternal questions of life and purpose, mortality and morality, and humanity’s place in each. Philosophy, once the handmaiden of Church theology in the Middle Ages, now lived and thrived for its own sake…

  While The Quorum made welcome room for more freedom of thought than its founders had ever intended.

  Based out of English castles and abbeys for better than its first half-millennium — a century here, two centuries there — The Quorum finally came to rest in the western Scottish Highlands in 1709. Two years before, centuries of strife between the two nations came to an abrupt end when the parliaments of both Scotland and England agreed to the Act of Union, and merged. Thus was born the Kingdom of Great Britain.

  In a more crowded world, where isolation was one of their greatest allies, those of The Quorum found it more to their liking in the north. The Highlands had always been of sparse population. They acquired a suitable castle along Loch Nevis and restored it to livability for those who would call it home, those who trained there, and those who needed respite and retreat from their clandestine duties elsewhere. It was here The Quorum marked its passage into the twentieth century, and life in the Highlands remained little altered by time, especially when compared with the speed of change farther south and abroad.

  The Highlands was as wild as ever, as picturesque an untamed land as it had been when clans battled for supremacy. It was carved with lochs, narrow ribbons of lake, and in late summer the land’s lower slopes were robed with purple heather. Most Highlanders were farmers, tending their crofts with frugal care, growing oats and potatoes and barley from this rugged land, raising hardy sheep and long-horned cattle. The Highlands were one vast pasture.

  Here The Quorum learned to cloak its identity to better blend with the modern age. Contemporary tourists and natives ostensibly believed the castle to be a retreat for the employees of some London-based corporation. Why else the shooting range, why else the formidable gate, why else the landscaping to construct a nine-hole golf course?

  Ownership of the estate became secreted within a labyrinth of dummy corporations and holding companies — benefits of more worldly influence and skills acquired over the centuries. Financial holdings were vast and self-perpetuating, stemming as far back as the first decade after The Quorum’s inception. The Fourth Crusade had been a grievous perversion of Pope Urban II’s original pious call to arms, holy aims now corrupted by political and commercial greed. The knights of Christendom never even made it to the Holy Land, instead serving as mercenaries of Venice and seizing
Constantinople in July 1203, despite its being a Christian city. The expedition was the single greatest destruction and plunder of cultural treasures during the entire Middle Ages, and no small amount filled the coffers of The Order of The Quorum.

  By the mid-twentieth century, The Quorum owed as much of its operational nature to military and intelligence networks as to the monastic and crusader leanings of its origins. But, after all, it was a far different world. Train and automobile and airplane had given the whole of modern humanity a mobility heretofore undreamed of … and the four Scapegoats in existence at any one time were no exception. If anything, they tended to travel more, miserable human beings — spiritual fulcrums often out of balance — desperately trying to outrun something grafted to their own souls. They needed to be watched constantly, and over the most recent decades, watching from afar had often given way to an operative or two insinuating him- or herself into the Scapegoat’s life as a sorely needed friend. For no matter where in the world the ancient deities took root, the fundamental human need for friendship and acceptance was a constant.

  The broadswords and battle-axes of medieval vintage had given way to firearms, for though the modern world was more civilized as a whole, pockets of violence thrived as turbulent as ever. A proficiency here was needed still, and training in the lethal arts now came largely from former British SAS troops, most of whom believed they were being paid for training batches of bodyguards, executive protectors, and the like.

  Its selective influx of membership became less a matter of obligation handed down from father to son, as in the days when chivalry fostered such legacies, than a matter of personal recruitment and grooming. With the emergence of psychology as a viable science in the late nineteenth century, a distinct personality profile began to emerge: conscientious and self-disciplined; primarily a rational thinker; a nonconformist tendency to avoid acceptance of status quo beliefs; drawn to abstraction and speculation; strong personal independence, yet needful of a forum for unconventional beliefs; a quest for spiritual truths regardless of whether they adhered to the tenets of any given religious denomination. A significant portion of them had suffered some great loss during childhood — usually one or both parents — which had truncated their sense of belonging and set them on a lifelong search for that lost person and a sense of wholeness. They were unfailingly loyal, though loyalty was neither easily won nor blindly given. Quorum recruiters found their most fertile supply of recruits in university philosophy departments and theology school dropouts.