The Wheel of Darkness

by Douglas Preston

  She crossed the foyer, her heels clicking on the marble floor, and climbed the wide stairs to the second-floor hallway. Tapestries and indistinct oil paintings lined the walls, stretching back into the dark heart of the house, interrupted by oaken doors darkened by time.

  She glanced along the left wall as she moved forward. Ahead, not quite halfway down the long hall, one door was open—battered open, the doorframe smashed, splinters of wood and twisted pieces of lead scattered about the floor. The yawning black opening exhaled a cold, cellar-like stench of mold and dead, greasy centipedes.

  She quickly passed by with a shudder. The door beyond drew her toward it. She was almost there.

  She placed her hand on the knob, turned it. With a low creaking sound, the door swung inward and a welcome warmth flowed out around her, enveloping her with the pleasant sensation of stepping into a cozy dwelling in wintertime.

  Aloysius Pendergast stood before her, dressed in black as usual, his hands clasped in front of him, smiling.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  The room was large and beautiful, with paneled wainscoting. A fire burned in a marble fireplace, and an old clock on the mantel chimed the hours, beside an antique gasogene and several cut-glass tumblers. A stag’s head mounted on the wall looked out with glassy eyes across a desk piled with leather-bound books and papers. The oak floor was covered with rich, dense carpeting, over which expensive Persian carpets had been laid in turn. Several comfortable wing chairs were scattered about, some with open books lying on their seats. It was an extremely comfortable, well-used, luxurious space.

  “Come and warm yourself by the fire,” he said, motioning her forward.

  She moved closer to the fire, keeping her eyes on Pendergast. There was something different about him. Something strange. Despite the utter reality of this room and this house, the edges of his form were indistinct, blurry, slightly transparent, as if he wasn’t quite there.

  The door shut behind her with a dull thud.

  He held out his hand for hers, and she gave it to him. He grasped it, suddenly very hard, and she tried to withdraw, but he pulled her toward him. His head seemed to waver, to bulge and dissolve; the skin cracked, and a glow emerged from within; and then his face peeled away and fluttered down in burning threads, revealing a visage that Constance recognized. It was the indescribable face of the Kalazyga demon.

  She stared at it, strangely unafraid, feeling its warmth, drawn to it with a mixture of fear and attraction. It seemed to fill her with fire: the ineffable, all-consuming, triumphant fire she had felt in her mad pursuit of Diogenes Pendergast. There was a purity to it that awed her.

  “I am will,” it said, with a voice that was not sound, but thought. “I am pure thought burned clean of any vestige of human sentiment. I am freedom. Join with me.”

  Fascinated, repelled, she again tried to withdraw her hand, but it held fast. The face, terrible and beautiful, drew closer to her. It wasn’t real, she told herself, it was only a product of her mind, the image of one of the thangkas she had contemplated for hours on end, now recreated by this intense meditation.

  The Kalazyga demon drew her toward the fire. “Come. Into the fire. Burn off the dead husk of moral restraint. You will emerge like the butterfly from its chrysalis, free and beautiful.”

  She took a step toward the fire, hesitated, then took another, almost floating over the carpeting toward the warmth.

  “Yes,” said another voice. Pendergast’s voice. “This is good. This is right. Go to the fire.”

  As she drew closer to the flames, the heavy guilt and mortification of murder that had lain on her shoulders melted away, replaced by a sense of exhilaration, the intense exhilaration and dark joy she felt when she saw Pendergast’s brother tumble off the edge of La Sciara into the red-hot depths below. That momentary ecstasy was being offered to her now, forever.

  All she had to do was step into the flames.

  One more step. The fire radiated its warmth, licking up into her very limbs. She remembered him at the very edge, the two of them locked together in a macabre caricature of sexual union, struggling at the roaring edge of La Sciara; her unexpected feint; the expression on his face when he realized they were both going over. The expression on his face: it was the most horrifying, most pitiful, and yet most satisfying thing she had ever seen—to revel in the face of a person who realizes, without the shadow of a doubt, that he is going to die. That all hope is gone. And this bitter joy could now be hers forever; she could be free to experience it again and again, at will. And she would not even need overweening vengeance as an excuse: she could simply murder, whoever and wherever, and again and again revel in the hot blood-fury, the ecstatic, orgiastic triumph . . .

  All hope is gone . . .

  With a scream, she writhed in the grip of the demon, and with a sudden, immense force of will she managed to break free. She threw herself back from the fire, turned and ran through the door, and suddenly she was falling, falling through the house, through the basements, the sub-cellars, falling . . .

  66

  THE STORM RAGED BEYOND THE OPEN RAILS OF HALF DECK 7, SPRAY sweeping across the deck despite their being sixty feet above the waterline. Liu could hardly think over the boom of the sea and the bellow of the wind.

  Crowley came up, as soaked as he was. “Are we really going to try this, sir?”

  “You got a better idea?” Liu replied irritably. “Give me your radio.”

  Crowley handed it over.

  Liu tuned it to channel 72 and pressed the transmit button. “Liu here, calling Bruce, over.”

  “This is Bruce.”

  “How do you read me?”

  “Five by five.”

  “Good. Buckle yourself into the coxswain’s station at the helm. Welch should take the seat across the aisle.”

  “Already done.”

  “Need any instructions?”

  “They seem to be all right here.”

  “The lifeboat’s almost completely automatic,” Liu went on. “The engine starts automatically on impact. It’ll drive the lifeboat away from the ship in a straight line. You should throttle down to steerageway speed only—they’ll find you quicker that way. The master panel should be pretty self-explanatory to a nautical man.”

  “Right. Got an EPIRB on this crazy boat?”

  “Two, and they’re actually the latest GPIRBs, which transmit your GPS coordinates. On impact, the GPIRB automatically activates at 406 and 121.5 megahertz—no action required on your part. Keep the lifeboat’s VHF tuned to emergency channel 16. Communicate with me through channel 72 on your handheld. You’re going to be on your own until you’re picked up—the Britannia isn’t stopping. Both of you stay strapped in at all times—you’re going to take a few barrel rolls in these seas, at the least.”

  “Understood.”

  “Questions?”

  “No.”

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.” Bruce’s voice crackled over the handheld.

  “Okay. There’s a fifteen-second automatic countdown. Lock down the transmit button so we can hear what happens. Talk to me as soon as possible after you hit.”

  “Understood. Fire away.”

  Liu turned to the freefall launch control panel. There were thirty-six lifeboats, eighteen on the port side and eighteen on starboard, each with a capacity of up to 150 people. Even launching one boat virtually empty like this, they still had plenty of capacity to spare. He glanced at his watch. If it worked, they’d have fifty minutes to evacuate the ship. A very doable proposition.

  He murmured a short prayer.

  As he initiated the launch sequence, Liu began to breathe a little easier. It was going to work. These damn boats were overengineered, built to withstand a sixty-foot free fall. They could take the extra strain.

  Green across the board. He unlocked the switch that would began the countdown on lifeboat number one, opened the cover. Inside, the little red breaker-lever glowed with fresh paint. This was a hell o
f a lot simpler than in the old days, when a lifeboat had to be lowered on davits, swinging crazily in the wind and roll of the ship. Now all you had to do was press a lever; the boat was released from its arrestors, slid down the rails, and fell sixty feet to land, nose first, in the sea. A few moments later it bobbed to the surface and continued on, driving away from the ship. They’d been through the drill many times: drop to recovery took all of six seconds.

  “You read, Bruce?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Hang on. I’m releasing the switch.”

  He pulled the red lever.

  A woman’s voice sounded from a speaker mounted overhead. “Lifeboat number one launching in fifteen seconds. Ten seconds. Nine, eight . . .”

  The voice echoed in the metal-walled half deck. The countdown ran out; there was a loud clunk as the steel arrestors disengaged. The boat slid forward on the greased rails, nosed off the end into open space, and Liu leaned over the side to watch it fall, as gracefully as a diver, toward the churning sea.

  It struck with a tremendous eruption of spray, much larger than anything Liu had seen during the drills: a geyser that rose forty, fifty feet, swept backward in ragged petals by the tearing wind. The VHF channel let loose a squeal of static.

  But instead of plunging straight into the water and disappearing, the lifeboat’s forward motion, combined with the added speed of the ship, pitchpoled it sideways, like a rock skipping over the surface of a pond, and it struck the ocean a second time full force along its length, with another eruption of spray that buried the orange boat in boiling water. And then it began to resurface, sluggishly, the Day-Glo hull brightening as it shed green water. The static on the VHF abruptly died into silence.

  The woman—Emily Dahlberg—caught her breath, averted her eyes.

  Liu stared at the lifeboat, which was already rapidly falling astern. He seemed to be seeing the boat from a strange angle. But no, that wasn’t it: the lifeboat’s profile had changed—the hull was misshapen. Orange and white flecks were detaching themselves from the hull, and a rush of air along a seam blew a line of spray toward the sky.

  With a sick feeling Liu realized the hull had been breached, split lengthwise like a rotten melon, and was now spilling its guts.

  “Jesus . . .” he heard Crowley murmur next to him. “Oh, Jesus . . .”

  He stared in horror at the stoved-in lifeboat. It wasn’t righting itself; it was wallowing sideways, subsiding back in the water, the engine screw uselessly churning the surface, leaving a trail of oil and debris as it fell astern and began to fade away in the gray, storm-tossed seas.

  Liu grabbed the VHF and pressed the transmit button. “Bruce! Welch! This is Liu! Respond! Bruce!”

  But there was no answer—as Liu knew there wouldn’t be.

  67

  ON THE AUXILIARY BRIDGE, LESEUR WAS FACING A TORRENT OF questions.

  “The lifeboats!” an officer cried over the others. “What’s happening with the lifeboats?”

  LeSeur shook his head. “No word yet. I’m still waiting to hear from Liu and Crowley.”

  The chief radio officer spoke up. “I’ve got the Grenfell on channel 69.”

  LeSeur looked at him. “Fax him on the SSB fax to switch to channel . . . 79.” Maybe choosing an obscure VHF channel to communicate with the Grenfell—channel 79, normally reserved for exchanges between pleasure boats on the Great Lakes—would keep their conversations secret from Mason. He hoped to God she wouldn’t be scanning the VHF channels as a matter of course. She’d already seen, of course, the radar profile of the Grenfell as the ship approached and heard all the chatter on emergency channel 16.

  “What’s the rendezvous estimate?” he asked the radio officer.

  “Nine minutes.” He paused. “I’ve got the captain of the Grenfell on 79, sir.”

  LeSeur walked up to the VHF console, slipped on a pair of headphones. He spoke in a low voice. “Grenfell, this is First Officer LeSeur, acting commander of the Britannia. Do you have a plan?”

  “This is a tough one, Britannia, but we’ve got a couple of ideas.”

  “We’ve got one chance to do this. We’re faster than you by at least ten knots, and once we’re past, that’s it.”

  “Understood. We’ve got on board a BO-105 utility chopper, which we could use to bring you some shaped explosives we normally use for hull-breaching—”

  “At our speed, in this sea and gale conditions, you’ll never land it.”

  A silence. “We’re hoping for a window.”

  “Unlikely, but have the bird stand by just in case. Next idea?”

  “We were thinking that, on our pass, we could hook the Britannia with our towing winch and try to pull her off course.”

  “What kind of winch?”

  “A seventy-ton electrohydraulic towing winch with a 40mm wire rope—”

  “That would snap like a string.”

  “It probably would. Another option would be to drop a buoy and tow the wire across your course, hoping to foul your propellers.”

  “There’s no way a 40mm wire rope could stop four 21.5-megawatt screws. Don’t you carry fast rescue craft?”

  “Unfortunately, there’s no way we can launch our two fast rescue craft in these seas. And in any case there’s no way we can come alongside to board or evacuate, because we can’t keep up with you.”

  “Any other ideas?”

  A pause. “That’s all we’ve been able to come up with.”

  “Then we’ll have to go with my plan,” LeSeur said.

  “Shoot.”

  “You’re an icebreaker, am I right?”

  “Well, the Grenfell’s an ice-strengthened ship, but she’s not a true icebreaker. We sometimes do icebreaking duties such as harbor breakouts.”

  “Good enough. Grenfell, I want you to chart a course that will take you across our bow—in such a way as to shear it off.”

  A silence, and then the reply came. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I read you, Britannia.”

  “You read me fine. The idea is, by opening selected bulkhead hatches we can flood forward compartments one, two, and three. That will put us down by the head enough to lift our screws almost out of the water. The Britannia will be DIW.”

  “You’re asking me to ram you? Good God, have you lost your mind? There’s a good chance I’d sink my own vessel!”

  “It’s the only way. If you approach head-on just a few points off our starboard side, moving not too fast—say, five to eight knots—then, just before contact, back one screw hard while engaging your bow thrusters, you could shear off our bows with your reinforced forward hullplates, swing free, and we would pass clear of each other on the starboard side. It’d be close, but it would work. That is, if you’ve got the helmsmanship to pull it off.”

  “I’ve got to check with Command.”

  “We’ve got five minutes to our CPA rendezvous, Grenfell. You known damn well you’re not going to get clearance in time. Look, do you have the knackers to do this or not? That’s the real question.”

  A long silence.

  “All right, Britannia. We’ll give it a try.”

  68

  CONSTANCE’S EYES FLEW OPEN, HER WHOLE BODY JERKING ITSELF awake with a muffled cry. The universe came rushing back—the ship, the rolling room, the splatter of the rain, the booming seas and moaning of the wind.

  She stared at the dgongs. It lay in an untidy coil around an ancient scrap of crumpled silk. It had been untied—for real.

  She looked at Pendergast, aghast. Even as she stared, his head rose slightly and his eyes came back to life, silvery irises glittering in the candlelight. A strange smile spread across his face. “You broke the meditation, Constance.”

  “You were trying . . . to drag me into the fire,” she gasped.

  “Naturally.”

  She felt a wash of despair. Instead of pulling him out of darkness, she had almost been pulled in herself.

  “I was trying to free you from your earthly fetters,” h
e said.

  “Free me,” she repeated bitterly.

  “Yes. To become what you will: free of the chains of sentiment, morality, principles, honor, virtue, and all those petty things that contrive to keep us enchained in the human slave-galley with everyone else, rowing ourselves nowhere.”

  “And that’s what the Agozyen has done to you,” she said. “Stripped away all moral and ethical inhibitions. Let your darkest, most sociopathic desires run rampant. That’s what it offered me as well.”

  Pendergast rose and extended his hand. She did not take it.

  “You untied the knot,” she said.

  He spoke, his voice low and strangely vibrant with triumph. “I didn’t touch it. Ever.”

  “But then how . . . ?”

  “I untied it with my mind.”

  She continued to stare. “That’s impossible.”

  “It is not only possible, but it happened, as you can see.”

  “The meditation failed. You’re the same.”

  “The meditation worked, my dear Constance. I have changed—enormously. Thanks to your insistence that we do this, I have now fully realized the power given to me by the Agozyen. The power of pure thought—of mind over matter. I’ve tapped into an immense reservoir of power, and so can you.” His eyes were glittering, passionate. “This is an extraordinary demonstration of the Agozyen mandala and its ability to transform the human mind and human thought into a tool of colossal power.”

  Constance stared at him, a creeping feeling of horror in her heart.

  “You wanted to bring me back,” he continued. “You wanted to restore me to my old, conflicted, foolish self. But instead, you brought me forward. You opened the door. And now, my dear Constance, it’s your turn to be freed. Remember our little agreement?”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “That’s right. It is now your turn to gaze upon the Agozyen.”

  Still, she hesitated.

  “As you wish.” He rose and grabbed the neck of the canvas sack. “I’m through looking after you.” He moved toward the door, not looking at her, hoisting the sack onto his shoulder.