The Light is the Darkness (18 page)

Pageant attendants escorted him to a staging area where he was consulted by a tight-lipped surgeon and a team of assistants. Conrad was offered an impressive selection of pills and injections—drugs to pump him up and inure him to pain, or drugs to sand down the edge and keep him calm, depending upon his strategy for the battle. He declined and sent the medics packing. DeKoon waved from the curve of a pillar a few yards away along the crumbling lip of the crater, then leaned back into the shadows and Conrad was alone. He regarded the stars while announcements crackled over speakers, introducing the main event of the ludus in several languages.

A youth, dressed in a toga and wreathed in laurels, came to lead him down the many steps into the pit. The boy warned him to watch his step on the final landing and the sandy floor of the arena proper. There had been a number of earlier matches, including an extremely messy battle royale between two dozen convicts flown in from various international prisons. The custodial crew could only do their best.

Oiled posts were driven into the ground at irregular intervals, torches socketed into the crowns. The resultant light was smoky and dull and his shadow stretched long and grotesque across the sand. Horns winded, deep, primal tones that raised the hairs on his body and vibrated in the soles of his feet.

Silence fell as the horns died and the announcements ceased and the crowd held its breath in anticipation of carnage.

The Greek’s retainers awaited; elderly and vile twins, dressed in soiled loincloths. Conrad recognized them as Uncle Kosokian’s creepy servants from the estate. One beckoned and dragged his nails across a stone outcropping and struck sparks. Conrad followed them away from the expectant eyes of the crowd, its burgeoning murmurs of unease and discontent. The ancients led him into a cavern that reeked of spoiled blood and charred meat.

The Greek lolled upon a throne fashioned from a pile of animal hides and armor and the shattered bones of men. More torches hissed and sputtered from crevices in the walls. Smoke tinged the air red as the heart of a stoked furnace. “Good to see you,” Uncle Kosokian said. He had grown to the immense proportions of the giants from Conrad’s nightmares; easily the height of three men standing upon one another’s shoulders. He wore nothing except for a crown of obsidian spikes and a necklace of bloody skulls. Sweat poured from his cockles and dewlaps. He sucked marrow from a cracked femur and tossed it atop the growing pile. The ancients scuttled to positions at the base of the throne, where they hissed and made signs of obeisance to their master.

Conrad’s knees quaked. His gladius fell from his hand and clattered upon rock. He said, “My, what big teeth you have, Uncle.”

Uncle Kosokian’s chuckle reverberated ominously. “Like certain Caesars of yore, I can’t help but descend into the arena for the occasional bit of sport. I know, I know, it’s unfair, undignified and a trait often derided in the illustrious. Regardless, nostalgia is undimmed by enlightenment. As a mortal, I was quite expert in the dispatch of my fellow man. To be deprived of a direct hand in such gory spectacles is a high price for godliness.”

“What does this mean? Am I to be enslaved? Eaten?” Conrad could still hear the children at the monastery screaming, could see them scooped into the slavering maws of monsters. This guise of Uncle Kosokian, albeit distorted to mythical dimensions, was yet a humanoid mask of his true self. Its true self was likely more accurate. Uncle K was a man by the thinnest definition only.

“I lied about many things, Conrad. My fondness for you is nonetheless genuine. Tonight is a celebration. You stand at the threshold of transcendence. You are of the primal stock, my son. The missing link between man and animal, your cells scraped from the soft sponge at the bottom of a pond when all the Earth was muck and amoeba. You possess a purity that none alive can match—not me, nor Drake, nor your sweet, lost sister. In a few eons, when your strength has grown, you will rise to gobble up your enemies and take dominion of this ball of dirt.”

“And Imogene?”

“Stubborn, stubborn boy. Assuming by some miracle she wasn’t captured by Drake as a thrall, or murdered by that wretch, Lorca, then by all means, take her as your queen, your slave, your whatever. None of my concern.”

Conrad half-listened to Uncle Kosokian, mesmerized instead by a sudden transformation of the ancients from wizened men to a pair of the taut, voluptuous women he’d known in a dozen incarnations over the past months. Rhonda smiled with lascivious glee and Wanda tipped him a wink and thrust her hip at an exaggerated angle. Smoke shifted a veil across these apparitions and as it drifted, they were scabrous trolls once more, snickering at his expression of horror.

“My apologies,” Uncle Kosokian said. “Think of them as hobbles…impingements upon your running amok, drunk with power. Pleasure instead of imprisonment. My servitors meant you no harm. Quite the contrary—they disposed of those two baboons who’d been extorting you. Marsh and Singh were into wet work. Sooner or later one of them would’ve decided to cut your throat in case their superiors decided to investigate. I couldn’t permit such a fate to befall you.”

“No,” Conrad said, and a multitude resided in that utterance. He gritted his teeth and composed himself. “And here we are. The guests will be pissed when there’s no fight. We’ll be ruined.” He smiled bitterly at this last.

“The guests? Provender, my boy. Grist for the mill. In a moment I shall make a minor adjustment to you that you might transmogrify into an astonishing and horrific creature of legend and then we’ll shamble forth and devour them where they recline. Kicking and screaming.”

“That sounds absolutely delightful.” The voice was soft and urbane and Conrad recognized it as Dr. Drake’s. Eyes burned molten red in the darkest corner of the cave at the heart of a column of shifting darkness. The column gathered height and mass, billowing upward and outward with silent menace.

“Damn you Ambrose,” Uncle Kosokian said, lurching to his feet, which was a frightening sight. “This is my demesne. You are trespassing in violation of our covenant. Begone!”

Dr. Drake said, “I am aware of our arrangement, Cyrano. Alas, I am compelled by reasons of appetite and paranoia to abscond with the young man. Surely, in your wisdom, you knew I’d come for him tonight.”

“I rather hoped you’d show a bit of restraint. There will be repercussions. You’re ruining the lad’s debut.”

Dr. Drake emerged from his roiling cloud of blackness. He was as Conrad remembered: frail and bald with a hook nose, his lips perpetually curved in a sardonic smile. He dressed simply in a dark shirt and slacks. “Greetings, Conrad. It’s been positively ages. How’s your sister, eh? Hold tight and we’ll be off for a conversation of cabbages and kings, my little oyster.” To Uncle Kosokian he said, “Hand him over, Cyrano. All is not lost; you can still eat the folk awaiting their bread and circuses.”

“Get behind me, Satan.”

“We must destroy him. I’ve never witnessed such acceleration, such raw potentiality. Had I suspected… Let’s say I’d have taken measures. Call it a failed experiment, hubris. If we hesitate, he’ll become too strong. We must act.”

“But I am. The blood and bones of five hundred sheep will be his initiation unto godhead. The boy will make a fine ally to my cause against you, old one.”

“The servant will become the master,” Drake said.

“Admittedly I fear you in your full aspect,” Uncle Kosokian said. He cracked his knuckles and rolled his shoulders as a prizefighter preparing for the blows to come. “However, you’ve overreached by appearing within my sphere. I say again, begone!”

“Don’t be a fool. I am sufficiently manifested to annihilate you and take what I wish.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, it’ll be bloody.”

“Do you promise?”

Galvanized by a nod from Kosokian, the ancients shrilled in unison like angry vultures and hopped toward the doctor, claws extended. Drake caught each man by the neck, midair. He smashed their heads together in a shower of pulp and cast the limp bodies against the cavern wall with such force their limbs detached and flipped end over end into the gloom. He wagged his finger at Uncle Kosokian and clucked his tongue.

Conrad stared with newly sharpened senses at the doctor, a kind of X-ray vision that bored through Drake’s façade. Drake’s flesh and bones flickered and rippled and Conrad had the sense of enormous fingers inserted into a puppet. Whatever plucked the strings existed partially upon another plane and across an improbable gulf; an entity that radiated malignant hunger and rage of scarcely conceivable scale.

“Run, Conrad. And remember the little people on the day of your return.” Uncle Kosokian stooped and brought a fist the size of a wrecking ball down onto Drake’s head with the evident purpose of driving the doctor into the ground as a mallet pounding a stake. The blow glanced aside without effect. Drake laughed and a thundercloud coalesced and swiftly descended to coil around the antagonists. Strokes of blue and yellow lightning licked forth and scorched rock, blasted sections of the floor into gravel. All of the torches snuffed at once and the cavern was cast into darkness.

Conrad took the opportunity to flee, his flight guided by the intermittent flashes of lightning. The earth shook and groaned and cracks opened in the ground and raced along the walls and thick, choking dust billowed forth. The curses and cries of the combatants rose to a tumult and became the death cries of mighty beasts, the roaring of calving glaciers, of collapsing mountains. He caught his heel on a stone and pitched headlong into a chasm of hot, whistling wind and blackness edged in dull red fire—

—and found himself kneeling in the courtyard of his Vegas hotel. Only, not precisely his hotel and not the Vegas he knew, not by a long shot.

The building loomed dark and silent, a mausoleum beneath the glittering desert sky. The entire city lay motionless, silent and sepulchral. A breeze rustled a flag on a pole. The stars were not right. Brooding emptiness crushed down with the weight of the universe itself. Conrad’s face was wet and he realized he bled from his eyes and mouth and nose. His blood mixed with flakes of ash and rust, and it tasted of antiquity and ruin. The moon slowly pierced the horizon and hung there, the blazing ivory tooth of a cannibal god taking a bite of the world.

His enemies would follow once they finished squabbling. He had to keep running lest Drake find and kill him. The problem was, he doubted there was any place on the planet to hide.
It’s a one-way trip
, Imogene had said. Forward to the end, beyond the end to the beginning. There would be no return. Actually, there’d be a return, it would just require several hundred million years of evolution.

It all felt so malleable, the moon, the stars, the night itself. He covered his face and concentrated, and discovered that there was nothing a bit dramatic about folding space and time. He allowed his mind to fill with the blackness of the illimitable void that surrounds the specks of dust that comprise the cosmos, and from this heart of darkness he summoned an image of his sister, pure and crystalline. Her image persisted for a moment before it wavered and dispersed. His vision dilated and contracted simultaneously, impossibly. In Imogene’s stead, something awesome and terrible shuddered, a stirring from the cosmic depths. He glimpsed a reflection of his own form, grown monstrous, elongated, distorted, all encompassing. A mouth,
his mouth
, yawned like a thousand black holes, eating planets, constellations, light, its own tail.

Dread overwhelmed him as the earth gave way and he was suctioned into the cathode of the universe, reduced to his constituent particles and absorbed.

VI

Conrad crawled from the soup and curled into a fetal position, gasping and wet with slime. He eventually opened his eyes to a lambent sun directly overhead. His unreasoning terror receded by degrees, although it lurked and his heart beat too fast. He lay supine on a mossy atoll surrounded by shallow, blood-warm seas. Steam drifted from the water. The sky was apple green.

“Behold the empire of trilobites,” Imogene said. She gleamed. “Hard to believe there’ll be little hominids skulking in yonder caves an eon or two down the road. Then flint and fire and dogs and rats. The adoption of gods and devils. Then, revenge, baby. Fiery, gory revenge. It’ll be great.”

“Something to look forward to,” Conrad said. He shivered violently, taken with a sudden chill. Contemplation of deep geological time wasn’t doing much to curb the fear in his heart, the wooziness of his brain. Nor did his sister’s dark smile lend him comfort. “I don’t know why I’m thinking of frying pans and fires…”

Imogene beamed her sinister smile as she reached up and casually grasped the sun and turned it counterclockwise as if unscrewing a light bulb.

A night without stars rolled over the world.

In the darkness, Imogene laid her cool hand upon his brow and her nails only dug in a little. She said, “Shall we begin?”

Table of Contents

Chapter One

I

II

III

Interlude

Chapter Two

I

II