Charlotte, who had been keeping a wary eye on things, grunted again.
“I don’t believe it!”
“I wouldn’t believe it either if I were you,” Garth replied casually as he pretended to sort through some papers on his desk, “but that’s irrelevant. I’m not the one who’s threatening the well being of the pigs housing the aliens’ minds. I’ve done what I was hired to do, and that’s all I care about. I’m not really concerned now with what you believe or do, but—just in case what I’ve told you is true—you might want to start getting your affairs in order. My suspicion is that you’ll be abducted within a matter of hours. They won’t harm you, but you will be living aboard that ship for the rest of your life. I’m sure you’ll eventually get used to the sight of them.”
Garth, his heart hammering, watched as Peter Erckmann walked to the door. He put his hand on the knob, but then hesitated. Finally he turned back to Garth, opened and closed his mouth a few’ times, then said in a tight voice, “I’ll withdraw my complaint against the pigs.”
“Mmm. Smart move, Erckmann.”
“Understand,” Erckmann said quickly, “it’s not because I believe you’re representing any aliens, but just because I don’t want to be bothered dealing with somebody who’d go to all this trouble just to protect a couple of pigs.”
“It’s always better to err on the side of caution; in this case, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. You’ve definitely done the right thing. Now, just to be on the safe side, I suggest that you apologize.”
“What?!”
“My clients’ species is very big on courtesy and ritual,” Garth said, reaching into his desk drawer and taking out an ear of corn, which he placed at the edge of the desk. “Tell the ambassador you’re sorry, and give her that ear of corn. It will be a nice gesture.” When Erckmann hesitated, Garth continued, “Go ahead and do it, Erckmann. You’ve already said you’d withdraw your complaint, so you might as well go whole hog, as it were. It’s just to make absolutely certain that the ambassador understands you mean her and the other one no harm. It’s for your own good, a kind of insurance policy. After all, you might not like alien food as much as the ambassadors like corn.”
Red-faced, Erckmann crossed the room, took the ear of corn from the desk, and held it out to Charlotte, who snatched it from his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, jumping back.
Garth shook his head. “Don’t mumble, Erckmann. Be clear. Say, ‘I’m sorry, Ambassador.’”
Erckmann swallowed hard, said to Charlotte, “I’m sorry, Ambassador.”
“Good,” Garth said curtly. “One last thing. Lay off Jenny and her family—and that includes her father. Tell him he can’t come to your group any longer. My clients have plans for the girl, and they don’t need her father messing up her head with nonsense about other aliens that don’t exist. Now you can go.”
Erckmann virtually ran to the door and out of the office, slamming the door shut behind him. Garth reached under his desk and flipped the switch there, then slowly exhaled and shook his head in amazement not unlike that he would experience two weeks later when the gunman who was stalking him, half hidden in the shadows, said “Garth, I got to kill you for what you did to me. You know you deserve it. Now c’mon out and let’s get this over with.”
“Burty? What the hell do you think you’re doing? Why did you shoot me?”
“You were there on the spaceship with the aliens that took me and put the worms under my skin, Garth. I remember now. You’re working with them.”
Garth tightened the belt around his leg, cutting off the flow of blood that was pouring from his wound and filling his shoe. He was beginning to feel faint, but he willed himself to focus. He groped around him in the darkness until his fingers touched what felt like a crowbar or tire iron. “Burty, you horse’s ass, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I do know that I’m going to beat your brains out if you don’t put that gun down. We have to talk.”
The man with the permanent brain damage came further into the building, angling across the pool of sunlight and toward the sound of Garth’s voice. “You were with the aliens when they experimented on me. Mr. Erckmann helped me remember. If I kill you, the worms will go away and I’ll feel better.”
Fighting the terrible weariness that was sapping his strength and making him want to do nothing more than lay his head down on the concrete and go to sleep, Garth, clutching the steel bar, inched forward in the darkness, toward the light. Waiting for Burty Bennett to tire of the hunt and go away was not an option; he would have to make a move soon, or he would die. “Burty, Erckmann’s pulling your pud. He wants you to kill me because he thinks that will save him. I’ve got him on videotape saying that anyone who believes in aliens is a fool or a nut case, and then apologizing to a pig he thinks is an alien ambassador. That’s not going to help him sell many more books. Your classmate Bill Stiller has seen the tape, and he’s dropped out of the program. He’s suing Erckmann, and he’s subpoenaed me to appear in court with the tape. He thinks having you kill me is going to solve his problems.”
For a moment it appeared that Bennett was coming to him, but the man stopped when he was a few feet away, looked to either side of him, then started toward the rear of the building, where the pigs could be heard rooting around in the darkness. Garth sighed, leaned back against the conveyor belt and smiled thinly as he recalled the look of wonder on Jenny Stiller’s face when she had seen herself, a pig, and a wolf vanish in a wink of light, remembered the excitement in her voice as she had leaped off the sofa in Garth and Mary’s living room, clapped her hands, and said, “Mr. Lothar made us all disappear! It’s a trick!”
Garth let the tape run through the section with Erckmann offering his sincere apologies to Charlotte, then turned off the VCR and looked around at the others. Mary, sitting at the back of the room, smiled broadly, winked, and blew him a kiss. Bill and Pat Stiller sat side by side with their daughter on the sofa that faced the television set. The man was leaning forward and holding his head in his hands while his wife, her face registering both anger and relief, gently stroked the back of his neck.
Jenny skipped over to Garth and put her hand in his. “That was so funny, Garth! Mr. Erckmann was talking to Charlotte just like she was a person, telling her he was sorry he tried to make her and Precious move away. Now everything’s going to be all right!”
Garth nodded. “Yes. Now I think everything is going to be all right.”
“What a wonderful trick!”
“Why don’t you tell your mom and dad what happened?”
“I took Precious outside, just like Garth told me to,” the child said, turning to her parents. “Mr. Lothar was waiting for me just outside the door. He took Precious and me around to the side of the house where there were other men, a truck, and a lot of lights and mirrors. He played with Precious and me like he always does, and he showed me some more magic tricks. We had a lot of fun. I didn’t know he made it look like we disappeared. That was really neat!”
“Mr. Erckmann was playing tricks too, Jenny,” Garth said quietly, stroking the girl’s hair. “He just forgot to tell you that he was playing tricks. His trick was to make you think that maybe you and your mom and dad had been taken away by people from another planet, and then he tried to make you remember it, even though it never happened. He tried to fool you, like Mr. Lothar does. But he’s not as nice as Mr. Lothar. You and your parents weren’t taken away by people from another planet, Jenny. Even if people from another planet do visit us one day, I think they’ll be too smart to want to hurt a little girl. You don’t have to be afraid of something that never happened, Jenny, and you can stop having nightmares. Your mom and dad would never let anyone harm you.”
“I know that, Garth. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Bill Stiller, still holding his head in his hands, choked back a sob, and then said in a quavering voice, “I want a copy of that tape, Garth.”
Garth put his hand on the girl’s back
, gently pushed her toward the door. “Loner’s got his muzzle on, and I’ll bet he’d love a good belly rub.”
“Okay!” the girl said, and ran for the door.
Garth waited until Jenny was out of the house, then turned to the girl’s father and said simply, “No.”
Stiller sobbed again. “The man made a fool out of me, and he almost destroyed my family!”
“If that’s how you see it, then you haven’t learned a damn thing from this little episode. Erckmann didn’t do anything to you or Jenny, Stiller. First you made a jackass out of yourself because you were filled with self-pity and looking for someone or something else to blame for your problems. Then you gave Erckmann a shot at your daughter. I didn’t do what I did for the pigs, and I didn’t do it so that you could see what an idiot you’d been; I did it so that Jenny could get her head straight. We all got very lucky. It was an incredibly long shot. The only reason Erckmann bit is because sometimes people like Erckmann who peddle nonsense get spooked when the same nonsense is peddled back to them. You’re a big boy, Stiller, and I’m not about to help you try to destroy Erckmann. If you’ve got a beef with Erckmann for making a fool out of you, frightening Jenny, and almost costing you your marriage, you handle it yourself. I won’t do anything to help you—not willingly. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand,” Pat Stiller said, looking up at him. “Garth, I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you’ve done.”
Garth nodded to the woman and walked from the living room, and days later, as he lay on the cusp between darkness and sunlight listening to the footsteps of the man who was stalking him, he reflected on the fact that it was Erckmann who was getting payback, and that payback could be Garth’s life. He knew he had to make a move now, for to wait much longer meant that he would bleed to death. Even if he could walk properly, it would be useless to stalk the other man in the darkness, for that would use up all the energy he had left. His only chance was to make it out of the building, closing the doors behind him, and then attack Burty Bennett with the steel bar if he followed.
Garth cinched up the belt around his leg, struggled to his feet, then hobbled as fast as he could toward the entrance.
“Hold it, Garth!”
With more than ten feet to go, Garth knew he could not make it. Rather than be shot in the back, he stopped and turned to face the man emerging into the sunlight pouring in through the open doors. “Last chance to give some thought to what you’re doing, Burty,” Garth said, his own voice sounding distant and metallic in his ears. “You’re not going to get rid of any aliens by killing me. You’re just going to end up spending the rest of your life clawing at your worms in some cell.”
“I gotta do it, Garth,” Burty Bennett said, raising his rifle and aiming it at Garth’s chest. “I gotta do it because of what you and the aliens did to me.”
Suddenly there was a flash of gray as Charlotte, running at full speed, came racing out of the darkness, heading directly toward Burty Bennett. Bennett started to turn, but he was too late, and Charlotte collided with the back of his thighs. Bennett flipped backward in the air, landed headfirst on the concrete, and lay still.
Garth staggered over to the unconscious man as Precious emerged from the darkness and nuzzled up to her companion. When Garth saw that the other man was still breathing, he raised the iron bar over his head. He was going to pass out at any moment, and Bennett would shoot him if he regained consciousness before someone came by and looked in through the open doors.
Garth lowered the steel bar, kicked away the rifle. He would have killed Burty Bennett without hesitation if the other man were still on his feet with the rifle, but he could not bring himself to crush the skull of a helpless, unconscious man. He took the remaining ears of corn from his waistpack and dropped them on the floor next to the fallen man. Then he sank to his knees beside Bennett. “Sit,” he said to Charlotte and Precious as he patted Bennett’s chest and stomach, and the last thing he saw before losing consciousness was the pigs doing precisely that.
VEIL
THE LAZARUS GATE
Veil dreams.
Vivid dreaming is his gift and affliction, the lash of memory and a guide to justice, a mystery and sometimes the key to mystery, prod to violence and maker of peace, an invitation to madness and the fountainhead of his power as an artist.
The Lazarus Person standing under the streetlight on the sidewalk outside the former warehouse Veil Kendry owned was an attractive woman in her late thirties or early forties. From the vast loft on the fourth floor where he painted and lived, Veil watched her through the one-way glass of his window. Although her face was impassive and her expression distant, he sensed her discomfort. Despite the fact that this was New York City’s East Village, the woman was not in danger, for Veil had taken steps when he had first bought the building fifteen years before to make sure that the few blocks surrounding his building were crime-free; drug dealers and others who committed violent crimes in his immediate neighborhood invariably chose not to return a second time, and some disappeared altogether. There was no bus stop in the middle of the block, no apparent reason for her to be standing there for almost forty-five minutes, and the fact that she was a Lazarus Person made him doubly suspicious. If she somehow knew about him and wanted to talk, she had only to press the buzzer at the entrance on the ground floor.
When an hour had passed and the woman still had not moved, Veil went to the telephone and called Dr. Sharon Solow at home. She was not there, and her answering machine did not come on. When there was no answer at her office in the Sleep Research Laboratories at St. Vincent Hospital, he went down to his arsenal of weapons and equipment on the third floor. He took a pair of night-vision binoculars off a shelf, turned off the lights, and went to a window at the front. First he scanned the rooftops of the buildings across the street, but saw no one there. In the darkened doorway of a storefront directly across the way, however, he spotted a man standing by himself, and he was wearing headphones. Veil peered into the night on the other three sides of the building, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Satisfied that the watcher and listener in the doorway were alone, Veil left the building through a freight-delivery entrance at the rear, went to the end of the block, around the building, crossed the street, and then came up on the man as silently as a shadow within the shadows and hit him in the solar plexus. As the man doubled over and gasped for air, Veil grabbed the back of his coat collar and marched him across the street. The woman now looked sad, and she remained motionless, watching him as he approached.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said quietly as Veil dragged the man up over the curb and shoved him toward the entrance to his building. “The man in green said he would—”
“You don’t have to explain,” Veil interrupted. “I know you meant me no harm, and I know you didn’t agree to act as a lure out of concern for your personal safety. I promise you they won’t threaten your family again. You’re free to go. There’s a subway station a few blocks north of here, and you’ll be safe walking there.”
The woman nodded, then turned and disappeared into the night. Veil pulled the man through the doorway into his building, and then shoved him hard against the doors of the freight elevator in the small foyer. He closed the entrance door behind him, and then turned to the man, who had slumped to the floor and was still holding his stomach. The expression on his face was a mixture of fear and wonder. He had fiery red hair, green eyes, and thick fields of freckles on his cheeks and forehead. Veil estimated him to be in his mid twenties, although he could have passed as a teenager—a potentially dangerous teenager who, for some reason, was prying into some very dangerous secrets.
“My God!” the young man said excitedly, shaking his head and licking his lips. “It’s true! You recognized what she was! The two of you must be able to com—!”
“Stop jabbering, or I’ll smack you again,” Veil said curtly. “Who the hell are you?”
The young man with the red hair and
green eyes swallowed hard, then removed his headphones, which hung askew around his neck. A single droplet of sweat had appeared in the center of his forehead. “I … won’t tell you anything. You can’t make me.”
Veil grunted. “Really? You look awfully young to be working in the field for the CIA, but when you reach middle age just about everybody starts looking young.”
“I said I wouldn’t—” The young man stopped speaking and cried out as Veil abruptly grabbed the lapels of his overcoat and yanked him to his feet, once again slamming him against the slatted elevator doors. “Are you going to torture me?”
“Nah,” Veil replied evenly. “I hate torture. I don’t mind torturing torturers, but you don’t look like one of those. But I will show you a trick your chiropractor probably doesn’t even know.”
Veil jerked the other man around and cupped his chin with his left hand. He twisted the man’s neck at the same time as he pressed hard with the heel of his right hand against a precise point on the man’s spine. There were sharp popping sounds in the man’s neck and back, and he collapsed to the floor.
The man in the overcoat sat on the floor with his legs splayed and his weight balanced on his hands as he stared up into the glacial blue eyes of the rangy man with the shoulder-length, gray-streaked yellow hair who stood over him. What he saw there was death, or worse. He glanced down and began to cry when he saw the puddle of urine forming between his legs. “I’m peeing myself and I can’t even feel it,” he sobbed. “You’ve paralyzed me.”
“Incontinence is the least of your worries, sonny. Right now you’re at least a candidate for a wheelchair. If you don’t give simple, straight answers to my questions, you’re going to end up being wheeled around on a hospital gurney for the rest of your life. As you may have noticed, I don’t bluff, and I rarely even bother to threaten. Now, if you don’t want me to shut the rest of you down, stop slobbering and tell me your name.”
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