Chiun had become even more withdrawn after the disappearance. He hadn't mentioned the phantom submarine to Smith in more than a day. The Master of Sinanju simply sat immobile in the center of his Folcroft quarters, eyes closed, deep in meditation.
That left only one CURE operative for field work.
With great reluctance, Smith unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. In an old cigar box tucked deep in the back of the drawer behind a stack of dummy sanitarium files, Smith found his old Army-issue Colt automatic.
He collected his battered leather briefcase and tucked the automatic in a special side pouch that was impervious to airport X-ray machines. Always cautious, Smith slipped a plastic laminated card in his wallet identifying him as airline security and thus legally entitled to carry a firearm on a plane.
Smith reserved a seat on the next flight to Wyoming, then shut down the Folcroft computers.
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He made one stop before leaving the building.
When he entered the room, Smith noted the candles and incense bowl of the previous day were gone, presumably packed away somewhere in the mountain of steamer trunks awaiting transshipment to North Korea. The heavy draperies were open, and dirty sunlight filtered grudgingly through the white translucent windows set high up in the concrete walls.
Chiun sat on the floor in the middle of a diluted patch of sunlight. The old man's eyes remained closed as Smith shut the door behind him.
"Master Chiun?"
"It is customary to knock," he informed Smith.
"I am sorry," Smith replied. "I thought you should know that I am leaving for Wyoming within the hour."
"You do not need my permission," Chiun said, thin of voice.
Smith felt a minor chill. The old Korean was usually effusive in his compliments to the man he called Emperor Smith. But now he was cold and distant. Chiun was at his most dangerous in these moods.
Smith cleared his throat and changed the subject. "There has been no word from Remo?"
Chiun's eyes squeezed more tightly as a cloud of worry passed across his aged brow. "I have not seen my son since yesterday," he admitted. "However, I have been attempting to locate him."
Smith frowned. Chiun had not left this room since the previous evening.
"Locate Remo?" Smith blurted. "How?"
Chiun sighed deeply. And for the first time that day
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opened his eyes. His stare was as barren and frigid as an Arctic winter.
"Why is gold the color gold?"
"Is that a riddle?" Smith asked.
Chiun merely stared.
"Gold is simply...golden," Smith offered.
"You would understand what it is I do even less," said Chiun, as if this settled the issue once and for all. And with that, the wizened Asian closed his eyes and refused to speak further on the matter. The whereabouts of Remo were a problem for Sinanju and would be dealt with by Sinanju; that seemed to be the Master of Sinanju's unspoken thought.
Smith got the message and backed quietly from the room. He would have neither Remo's help nor the help of the Master of Sinanju on his trip to Thermopolis.
Long after Smith had gone, Chiun remained immobile in the basement room, hazel eyes shut like trapdoors.
His desperate quest for his lost pupil continued.
No human being was present when the shadow emerged from the sea of posttwilight darkness. Therefore no man saw the black shape slide effortlessly through the gates like a silent fog.
Like a knife the distinctive wail of a frightened lemur sliced through the cold, dead heart of the night. The sound set off a chain reaction of complaint.
Nearby gibbons and spider monkeys howled when the shadow drifted past.
Gorillas propelled themselves swiftly away on leathery knuckles, finding safety behind trees and inartifi
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straw-filled corners, as far distant as possible from the wisp of moving darkness.
Farther away a dozen lions roared in terror at the night as a small herd of elephants trumpeted and stomped in fear beyond their heavy walls.
The shadow moved through turnstiles and past rusting metal railings. The lock on an unmarked rear door shattered as it passed. Fragments from the door handle skittered off in a symphony of metallic clinks, landing in large part beneath a pair of vacant benches and under a boarded-up vendor's cart.
The shadow passed inside.
The building was warm, the corridor suffused in the dull white glow of a single recessed light. A sudden hand movement shattered the light casing, and the bulb exploded in a spray of delicate wedges. The glass tinkled softly to the floor in the wake of the passing shadow.
The corridor led into a large chamber that had baked in the daytime sun. It still held the faint trace odors of hundreds of sweating men, women and children.
The main pathway in the center of the chamber was lined on either side by metal railings, the height and design of which vaguely resembled horse rails in an old Western. Beyond the railings, high Plexiglas panes cordoned off large cubicles from one another and offered a view inside each of the giant glass cages.
Most of the creatures within the boxed-off sections of glass didn't move as the shadow passed them by. Some did slither in lazy S-shaped paths through patches of transplanted grass and shrubs. Still more were looped around the branches and trunks of
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artificial or transplanted trees, but the movements these made were barely perceptible to the naked eye.
The shadow passed the cages of the cobras, asps and rattlesnakes without slowing. It found what it wanted in the final blocked-off pen at the far end of the main visitor's room on the other side of a sheet of one-inch-thick Plexiglas.
A plaque set below the exterior window was etched with the legend P. Molurus. Below that, in smaller letters, was written Indian Python.
The thing that had been Remo Williams paused before the sheet of heavy reinforced Plexiglas.
Remo could see himself in the glossy reflective surface of the glass-walled python cage, but everything seemed strange and distant. It was as if he were a faraway spectator to his own actions. His face, crawling with shadows, was a hollow-eyed death's-head.
When the demon force had taken over his mind, Remo had been helpless. He saw the image of the malevolent combatant that had raged within him since his encounter at the Truth Church ranch strike out at the more docile form. He did not know if the blow had struck home, but at the point when the outstretched hand of the evil combatant would have landed, both creatures had fled from his vision.
The dimensionless black plain on which they had stood was with him still, but it was now vacant, devoid of any life.
The moment they had vanished, Remo Williams had died, as well.
He remembered the look of anguish on Chiun's face when the old man realized that he had lost him to the Pythia. He recalled vividly his flight from Folcroft. He
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remembered skulking through the streets of Rye like some mongrel dog.
A full day of restless wandering for the soul that now controlled Remo's body had passed. And he had watched it all from a surreal vantage point, back behind his own eyes.
Superimposed above all the images flashing before him was the vacant black battlefield. Remo had the intense feeling that there was something lurking over the alien horizon. Something more deadly than the spirit of the Pythia now controlling his actions.
The reptile house at the Bronx Zoo reappeared before him in a haze. His own face in the window of the python tank was washed-out and lifeless. A skull clinging to a thin mask of flesh.
A hand flew out before him. Remo recognized it as his own. It struck the side of the tank, and a vertical crack appeared beneath the tips of his slashing fingers. The thick Plexiglas split into two neat halves, and the thing that controlled Remo popped one side from its frame and set the heavy sheet of glass on the floor beside the tank.
A sudden hop, and he was gliding wraithlike through
the cage. The leaves from a dozen different transplanted subtropical bushes brushed silently against his shins as he moved.
It was humid inside the cage, and the thing that had taken possession of Remo smelled the air like an alert hunter.
Behind it and unseen, something large and dark uncoiled from the low-slung branch of an artificial tallow tree.
Remo somehow knew what was happening. The
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mingling of minds had produced a dim form of understanding within him.
It was the snake. The snake held some kind of significance.
He saw visions, more images across the limitless black plain.
The evil combatant returned, but this time he was alone. He appeared almost as an infant in this vision and he wore on his back a quiver full of arrows. In his hand he held a golden bow.
All at once there appeared before the young combatant a great serpent. It moved to attack the boy. Quick as a flash, the youth's hand sought a quivered arrow and launched the deadly missile into the head of the massive creature. The small warrior repeated this motion again and again, spearing the hapless creature with arrow after arrow until at last its great pointed tail flopped lifelessly to the ground.
It was dead.
The image vanished. Remo was again in the reptile cage.
The serpent. Its death was somehow part of a rebirth.
But not of the Pythia. It was the rebirth of something much vaster. Something far more terrifying. Something hunkered down over the far side of the horizon of his mind.
As his thoughts returned in the cage, some lucid part of Remo's brain told him that something was at his ankle.
Like a spectator to his own actions, his head looked down, allowing Remo to see what his body had felt.
A fat, gleaming brown rope was wrapped around
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his right leg. It was banded and spotted in hues of chocolate and mud.
The thing moved and Remo fell.
Palm fronds slapped against his forehead. Remo landed face first in a tuft of tall sawgrass.
A cool pressure surrounded his waist.
The slow, crushing sensation didn't faze the presence of the Pythia in Remo's mind. As the snake's scaly coils slid up around his chest, it remained calm. As if the python sought this cold encounter.
As the unblinking head looped higher, the massive body rippled almost imperceptibly while wrapping its neck around Remo's throat. He felt a growing pressure against his windpipe.
The python, purchased from an East Indian zoological society, was over thirty feet long and had not eaten in days. While it was normal for a python to attack smaller animals, it wasn't unheard of for a snake as large as this one to attack and suffocate something Remo's size. Especially when hungry.
The creature's amber eyes looked directly into Remo's own as it constricted its muscular coils harder.
With every exhalation, the python squeezed Remo's rib cage. Every intake of breath that followed was shallower and less charged with oxygen than the one before. Inexorably the python's shrinking body was starving Remo's lungs of the one element that fueled the sun source that was Sinanju.
Oxygen.
The alien force in Remo's mind seemed almost to mock the efforts of the huge reptile. As the snake strove harder to crush the breath from the warmblooded mammal trapped within its constrictor coils,
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the demon within Remo slowly extracted a hand from the living bonds.
Remo watched as his own hand swatted the creature's flat head, almost as if the Pythia was remonstrating a badly behaved pet.
Immediately the python's coils dropped into loose ropes. It flopped to the cage floor.
Shedding the last clinging coils, the thing that possessed Remo stood.
In the thicket of carefully tended jungle, the reptile stirred. It had only been stunned. The flat, blunt head swayed back and forth, as if adjusting to the vibrations it felt through the bottom of the cage.
Remo felt himself step over the snake. The head lifted slightly and turned toward the new movement. He felt a tingle of evil jubilance in the pit of his own stomach.
Remo sensed what was really happening. The demon within him was only playing with the giant snake. It intended to toy with the creature, and when the entertainment value had at last been exhausted, it would slaughter the python in fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. This was somehow the final step toward the ultimate perversion of Remo's body. An inexplicable rite of passage.
And Remo felt a deep, helpless shame that his perfect body was being corrupted by this ancient demon.
He could not allow it to happen.
The snake slithered about his ankles once again. This time the demon within Remo anticipated the attack. He didn't fall.
While the inner presence was concentrating on the
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external pressure of the predator snake, Remo willed himself loose.
The thick hide wrapped around his chest.
Remo forced himself outward, pushing back to where his mind belonged. As he concentrated all his energy on a single, minuscule effort, he imagined sweat appearing on some internal brow. It was a small thing. But it would be proof that Remo was not totally helpless.
The snake pulled itself up around his neck and bobbed unsteadily in a gawking position a foot before the pale white face of its prey. A long flat tongue darted hungrily from its lipless mouth.
Remo pushed outward. Farther, farther.
The snake brought its alien snout closer. The huge coils below tightened.
With a phenomenal effort of will, Remo forced his index finger to twitch. The movement was quick and sharp. He felt the rough texture of the snake's hide against the pad of his finger.
He felt.
There was a flare of surprise from the presence within him.
Remo pushed again—hard. His hand twitched spas-tically. It rubbed along the interior of the coiled snake.
Something close to panic rose from the spirit of the Pythia within him. It was an inner remonstration. The Pythia had frittered away precious time when it should have first concentrated all of its efforts dispelling the last vestiges of consciousness from its latest vessel.
The rebirth was incomplete. To become the true Pythia, it had to kill the snake. And if the Pythia failed,
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Apollo could not assert his presence in the modern world.
Both hands moved freely now. The shoulders rolled in a shrugging motion, pushing the snake down farther.
The spirit of the Pythia had underestimated Sinanju. Underestimated its power because of the weak-minded Tang so many years before.
The Pythia had assumed that the Remo-vessel was as corruptible as the others. But his training in Sinanju had made Remo stronger.
It could not fail its master, not now. Not when it was so close.
The Pythia forced its will upon its vessel once more.
Remo's hands wrapped around the python's throat. The Pythia squeezed.
The thin, merciless reptilian mouth dropped open as the creature gulped helplessly for air. It thrashed its head, but could not prevail. The giant tail swung around defensively, looping around Remo's ankles.
Remo had had possession of his body only briefly. With a murderous lunge the demon within him had reasserted itself. It felt as if his spirit had been knocked backward into his own mind. Remo concentrated harder, trying to assert mastery over his own body once more.
As the life ebbed from its heavy, limp frame, the tail of the snake began twitching reflexively. It was dying. And Remo was the instrument of its death.
Remo suddenly felt the huge thing he had sensed on the other side of the bleak internal horizon loom into view. The thing was giant. It strode across the barren terrain of his thoughts like a colossus. It was
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nearly larger than his mind could conceive, greater than his consciousness could encompass. It was a vague mountain of pure evil. And it was moving toward him.
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br /> At that moment Remo realized that it would not be possible to defeat the thing within him in this place. He could quell it, stall it. But it could not be beaten.
Not while it still dwelled within him.
It would first need to be removed.
With a sudden desperate leap, Remo forced his spirit outward. In a flash of blinding energy he was in control of his body once more.
His limbs jolted at the sudden surge of energy in his muscles, and Remo, still wrapped in the loosened coils of the deadly python, dropped in a heap to the cage floor.
In a struggle that wasn't visible externally, but that exploded within him with a force more powerful than a supernova, Remo seized his essence from the spirit of the Pythia, taking hold of his own mind like a tenacious climber scrambling for a handhold above the precipice of his own darkest fears.
Desperately he held on to his body with his mind, with his will, with his very soul.
The snake, jarred loose by Remo's actions, relaxed its coils from around its slender prey, to slither off into the leaf-choked shadows, apparently deciding that its meal was no longer worth the effort needed to conquer.
Sweating and shivering, Remo climbed to his feet.
His mind had touched that of the creature within him—and he now knew what it had intended all along.
The Pythia was as much a servant of Apollo as the
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vessels were servants to the Pythia. And the giant evil thing that had moved toward him in his thoughts was the spirit of the sun god himself, ready to take possession of Pythia's latest vessel.
East would meet West within him.
Remo felt the mocking presence at the periphery of his thoughts once again and knew it to be Apollo.
He couldn't beat him. He had quelled the spirit of Apollo for now, beaten the Pythia twice in as many days, but he couldn't fight this battle over and over again. It had taken all his inner strength to stave off the Pythia this time. Next time Remo couldn't hope to win. Not until he banished the spirit that lurked within the darkest recesses of his own mind.
The spirit had slithered into his mind via the smoke and steam of the Pythia Pit, and instinct told him that any hope of separating their intertwined minds resided in the rocky hillock of the modern Delphic temple far to the west.
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