The Light is the Darkness (12 page)

“You prick,” Dorsey said.

Marty Cardinal sobbed, but he spread his fingers and stared at the piece of paper for several seconds, until his bloodshot eye began to blink rapidly and overflowed and he covered it again. “I wasn’t a spook. Nope. Thass just a color field. A fuggin’ Rorschach, maybe. It don’ mean nothin’.”

That’s what they all said, more or less. “Oh, it bears some significance. Try again.”

“Not to me. Not to anybody. It’s a fuggin’ inkblot.”

“When your grandson concentrated on the drawing what did he see?”

“You prick,” Dorsey said.

For a long moment Marty Cardinal remained hunched, his frame sagging in grief. Then he said, “Barbs.”

“Barbs,” Conrad said.

“The Barbs of God. Dicky was eleven years old. The last three months of his life, God is all he talked about. How God was going to eat every one of us.
You too, grandpa. You too
.” Marty Cardinal pointed at Conrad. “You too, ya lousy sonofabitch.”

“Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: Dicky had a word. A trigger. What was it?”

“Whah?”

“The trigger, Marty. The auto-hypnotic trigger. Short, pithy, maybe a tad sinister.”

“I don’ remember.”

“Yes, yes you do. I don’t think you’ve forgotten anything about Dicky. No matter how much you drink, you won’t. My father never got over what he did to his son, either.” Conrad studied the shrinking glare of his cigarette coal, contemplated touching it to the web of Marty Cardinal’s thumb and index finger. Marsh or Singh would’ve carted the crooner to a private location and done exactly that, would’ve done a hell of a lot more than that, in fact.

“Why ya wanna know the word? Takes more than the word. You gotta look at a whole shitpot a pictures like that one there, listen to some scary recordings. Whole series of injections. There’s a chemical protocol. Word won’ help ya.”

“I’m aware of the protocols. Intimately.”

“Ya took the series?” Cunning surfaced in Marty Cardinal’s watery eyes. A glimmer of viciousness and well-oiled deceit. “I read the numbers once…the injections kill six outta ten. Drives three point five more bugshit mad. Ya took the series. No wonder you’re… It was the Brazilian, huh?”

“The process has been refined. It’s a nine in one shot, thanks to modern medicine. No series anymore, not like rabies.”
Thanks to Dad. I’ve never been so proud.

“Ya took the Series. Dumbshit. Now they own you.
He
owns you. Dumbshit.”

“We’ve got a lot in common,” Conrad said. “It grows late, Marty.”

Marty Cardinal must’ve sensed doom in Conrad’s lazy expression. “Yeah, fine. Ya wanna know the magic word, I’ll tell ya. Ain’t a state secret, is it? Whatch ya deserve, I guess.” He half leaned, half sprawled across the table, cupped his hand and whispered the trigger into Conrad’s ear.

Bang.

The world ended.

The world was remade.

The fingernail chasm between destruction and creation was a frozen, howling void, a hairline fracture on the windshield of the onrushing cosmos. It flickered through Conrad’s mind, writhed in microbial convolutions, etched itself into a secret expanse of cerebral membrane, a trilobite embalmed in Paleozoic flowstone.

The lounge sat there, relatively unaffected.

Conrad dropped the paper and it blackened and crisped to ash. Now with the primal rush of aggression leaching from his nervous system he was bone-tired and weak and slightly ashamed of what he’d done. He smoked another guilty cigarette while Marty Cardinal wept and Dorsey wiped his friend’s nose with a napkin and muttered epithets. In a bit the old men lurched from the table, exited through the enigmatic door with the blinky EXIT sign.

Later, when the other drunks were migrating in pods and the bartender began to sadly sweep, Conrad made it to his feet and drifted down the long corridor of swollen, subterranean murk to his room. Empty, thank Christ and the Four Horsemen.

He fell across the bed and sank exactly as a stone dropped edge-first into the sediment far beneath the scales of the sea.

III

He awoke, although that was not a certainty. His thoughts were sticky, his faculties stupefied. He knew he was in a hotel on planet Earth in the Southwest of the continental United States. This he knew, of this he was certain despite the fact gravity and vertigo conspired against him, despite the open mutiny of his racing heart and shrieking nerves.

The room throbbed with bloodless light, the ashen flush of a landscape under the caul of an eclipse. The amniotic light sluiced against cheap blinds, dripped and seeped through chinks and seams, patterned great, ominous shadows against the clapboard walls. Somewhere, a fan clattered in its cage, a radiator churned.

He was paralyzed. The hotel around him became a translucent honeycomb where nothing stirred in the twilight chill. Rows of beds with lumps of humanity nestled tight.

An inverted female shape hung midway in the gulf beyond the bed and before the opaque blinds. The woman floated, spread-eagle as a Vitruvius Woman, hair flowing against the dingy carpet, her features a sulfurous smear amid velvet and ink. She emitted low static, the electronic snarl of radio waves creeping through the outer regions of solar vacuum. She resonated a Hadal thrum, seethed and roiled like a swarm of wasps in a hive of bones. Her dim shape accumulated mass with each snick of the clock. She achieved a dreadful aspect and unfathomable density and began to uncoil as angel hair, the wings of a man o’ war, a hungry wasp.

(Doyouunderstandwhatishappeningyouunderstandwhatishappeningunderstandwhatishappeningwhatishappeningishappeninghappening?)

He struggled to lift the anchor from his chest and then nothing.

IV

Conrad was alone when gray morning filtered into his brain. He showered and shaved and noted that his bruises were rapidly healing. Marks of violence giving way to simple weariness, the pouches and bags of encroaching age. Dented, but serviceable.

He drove for hours, sluggish and dreamy, imagining the serum, broken down and reduced to its naked, predatory mode, spiraling through his nervous system, clinging and entwining like morning glory wrapping creepers around a trellis, yearning for heat and sustenance. His fingers tingled, felt detached. The flesh of his cheeks was cool as porcelain. Muscle spasms and tremors. No hallucinations, no blackouts at least. No superhuman powers, either; no cosmic leaps of intuition, no burgeoning sense of godly omnipotence. All quiet, except for numbness and occasional nausea.

The city lifted itself from the flat-backed plains as a colony of blue-bottle glass and aerodynamic steel. Everything was polished to an antiseptic gloss; the boulevards ran in perfect geometric grids and russet leaves collected neatly in gutters and along curbs. Citizens wore winter suits and winter haircuts and were scrubbed bone-white to match the sky. They moved with clockwork precision, aboard shiny Peugeots and BMWs, and on the hoof in their Gucci’s and stolid sensible wingtips; the buildings and the people were clever miniatures of the mighty eastern metropolises poured from a bag of jacks.

Conrad liked that the exchange was to occur in the Coleville Museum of Natural History, a massive and modernized brownstone where the halls were so quiet, the creak of his shoes echoed, chased after grains of dust in hidden corners. Following a ludus there was always an exchange, a greasing of the palm; traditionally the transfer was resolved in an exotic locale; a catacomb; a mosque; a half-collapsed amphitheater along the Turkish coast; atop the ramparts of some rundown castle in Scotland; precisely the canvases upon which Conrad performed his cruel and terrible art. Singh relished such melodrama and Singh called the shots. The museum was an improvement for the simple fact it was indoors during the day in a warm, cheery, if naturally, illuminated environment. Conrad was only sorry they hadn’t adhered to their usual conclaves. A public rendezvous complicated the situation immensely. He calmed himself with the idea that he’d think of something ingenious when the moment of truth arrived.

He waited near a towering cube which enclosed wax simulacrums of Neolithic tribesmen hucking spears at a rampant smilodon. Conrad’s visage hung in a panel of glass.
My bothers, my brothers!
He concentrated on rebuilding his image after the patterns of the government inkblots until his reflection wavered and ran with the fluidity of oil and—

—he was among them shoulder to shoulder in the arid dawn pale as a flood of dying starshine the sun an ochre smear above fields of bloody grass he waited on smiling death spear in hand animal musk fear musk in his nostrils upon his grimy skins his own skin and that dreadnought was coming for them belly low amid the rocks and weeds that killing machine coming for them coming through the bloody grass with its mouthful of knives coming steady for them as a falling tree a wave an avalanche of bloody rocks upon them hungry as fire for their flesh as fire is hungry for the bloody grass but he stood his ground he had his brothers he had his spear here the monster came silent and hungry as a shadow crossing the earth—

The hunter who most resembled Conrad was sideswiped and folded double under curved strokes of black-splattered ivory; head askew, he grinned at Conrad and said, “They Who Wait have always been among us, brother!” Then a tusk dipped into the hunter’s cheek and a sticky sundew replaced his rude features.

Conrad blinked and there was beautiful, exotic Singh sliding toward him, serenely passing through grainy sun shafts thrown down by phalanxes of skylights. It struck him with a sudden, nauseating clarity that Singh was nothing so much as DeKoon’s enigmatic counterpart, the pallid European’s negative. Conrad was disconcerted to picture that duo ferociously coupled upon a bed in some ramshackle bungalow, yin and yang, the Ouroboros swallowing its tail while earthquakes rocked the Andes and a cloud blotted the sun.

Singh waved, desultory and unaffected, inconspicuously attired, according to the fashion of the natives, in tones of steel and coal. He was tall and slim and dark as the bark of an ancient madrone tree. Singh was the chameleon in the madrone tree’s branches. He said, “Say, is that luggage ticking, old bean?”

“Hello.”

“Hullo. My, my, aren’t you lovely as a corpse.” Singh embraced him lightly, kissed his forehead. The dusky man wore heavy, foreign cologne. He gleamed unctuously. “Did you see the Tyrannosaurus on the first storey? Astonishing!”

Conrad extricated himself from Singh’s grasp, hefted the briefcase. “That isn’t a T-Rex.”

“Wot, wot?”

“Nothing. Shall we?”

“No rush. I’m on vacation. Let’s nip off to my flat. Not mine, it’s a corporate timeshare, but anyway. You look like you could use a drink.”

Conrad shrugged as if the suggestion meant nothing to him. His chest constricted and his breathing came shallowly. Red sparks dashed mini novas against his eyelids. “Lead the way.”

As they walked along the promenade, he was tempted to scan the surroundings for Marsh or whoever else lurked behind the potted plants. He didn’t quite dare. Singh would know.

My fly is open.

“You drive,” Singh said when they left the museum and stood on the sidewalk in the austere light of a gathering storm. Snow was possible. Meteor showers.

Is this a capture or a kill team? Is Singh black-ops? I don’t think so, but damn, maybe. Doesn’t matter; it all ends with a gunshot, a dose of something unpleasant from a syringe. DeKoon won’t be happy when I disappear. Unless he really was off his rocker about the Finn. Damn, maybe that was it. One strike and he called in the dogs. Or maybe he’s a member of the club. Forget it. Get your game face on. Zip your pants, idiot.

Conrad couldn’t detect any telltales that his car had been tampered with or searched. Then they were accelerating through the clean streets. Conrad was on automatic. He vaguely registered the myriad hyper-accentuated details—how a goodly quarter of the neon shop signs were in Korean or Thai characters; the bare-boned shade trees, stark and comatose; the lowering clouds, faceless as a mob; the flesh of his lumpen, knobbed hands had begun to wattle and wrinkle, blue-veins bulging as he clasped the wheel. The hair on his knuckles was gray. Tired skin, tired blood. A man could pump all the iron he liked, muscle got old sooner or later, Jack Lalann and Arnold notwithstanding.

“How did your conversation with Mr. Cardinal go?” Singh lighted a cigarette.

“He revealed the secrets of the universe.”

“The secrets of the universe are of scant interest to a brute such as yourself.”

“I wanted him to sign my vintage LP. He promised me backstage passes to a Neil Diamond concert.” Conrad hit the brakes to avoid colliding with a taxi. He seized the diversion to scan the rearview mirror for a tail. Lots of cars back there.

Singh braced his left hand against the dash. His hand was soft and sinuous as the weaving head of a viper. “Do you really take us for total morons?”

“I probably shouldn’t answer that one.”

“To blazes with your personal issues. Your bloody agenda is only permitted so long as it aligns with ours!” Singh’s face was tight. He relaxed with a visible effort. “You’ve been too obvious, too indelicate. You’re starting to attract enemies. I would not be surprised if MI6 is out for your balls after that brouhaha with the Honduran expat last year—what was his name?”