Diamond Mask (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (15 page)

I
WAS THERE WHEN DEATH GAVE LIFE TO THEM, BOTH
F
URY AND THE
creature called the Hydra. It happened on Good Friday in the year 2040 in the little town of Berlin, New Hampshire, on the day that Victor Remillard finally died.

It had been the custom of my nephew Denis, Victor’s older brother, to assemble the immediate family each year on that date, ostensibly to pray for Vic’s recovery and for the salvation of his soul. I had never participated in the annual ritual before, judging it to be futile and possibly even dangerous; but that year Denis’s wife Lucille was unavailable and so I was dragooned to complete the metapsychic minyan.

There were fifteen of us gathered around the bed of the criminal genius who had unwittingly helped to precipitate the Intervention. After he had tried and failed to murder me and nearly three thousand of Earth’s leading operants, he had been struck down—perhaps by me, perhaps by the entity I call the Family Ghost—and lapsed into a mysterious coma that deprived him of all sensory input and of all his metafaculties except self-awareness. His body, having the Remillard self-rejuvenating gene complex, had remained healthy for nearly twenty-seven years while he endured the ultimate solitary confinement. But finally, at long last, Victor seemed to be sinking toward natural death.

Present for that last Good Friday prayer session were all seven of Denis and Lucille’s adult grandmasterclass children together with their operant spouses—the so-called Remillard Dynasty. The oldest was Philip Remillard, with his wife Aurelie Dalembert. She was the only wife who was not pregnant at the
time. The other Remillards were Maurice, with his wife Cecilia Ashe; Severin, with his wife Maeve O’Neill; Anne Remillard, who was unmarried, although she did not become a Jesuit until some years later; Catherine Remillard (enceinte), with her husband Brett McAllister; Adrien, with his wife Cheri LosierDrake; and the most brilliant of the lot, Paul Remillard, with his wife Teresa Kendall.

When Denis attempted to link me into the metaconcerted “prayer,” I balked. Frankly, I was scared shitless, wanting to have nothing whatsoever to do with Vic, who was the most evil man I have ever known. Pray for him? Maybe if I was shamed into it I might have squandered a two-bob candle in some nice, bright church, on the off chance that Jesus knew something about Vic that the rest of the world did not and was willing to forgive and forget. But in no way was I going to be involved in any interactive mental shenanigans concerning that thoroughgoing bastard. My charity does not easily embrace a man who had attempted to turn me into his zomboid stooge—and when that failed, who was ready to drain my lifeforce like a bottle of Heineken.

So when Denis tried to incorporate me into his metaconcert I slithered out. And since I was his foster father, with all of the operant parent’s usual metapsychic perks, not even his paramount coercion could force me to stay. Thus it was that my mentality stood aside somehow, unable to perceive what transpired among Victor and the others, and I became aware that an entirely new actor had come onstage.

I knew in a lightning stroke of insight that it was a demon, a mind-devourer conjured somehow by the dying Victor. It didn’t get me because the Family Ghost saved my pathetic ass, telling Fury to do what it had to do, but not with me. In the dream, or vision, or whatever the hell it was, I clung to a gigantic simulacrum of the key-ring charm that I call the Great Carbuncle and was towed back to reality.

Where I discovered that Victor was dead.

The Dynasty and Denis and I were all safe, and so was baby Marc, Paul’s son, who had been left in an adjacent room with a nurse.

Victor’s body was cremated, and on Easter Monday of the year 2040 Denis went to Anticosti Starport and handed a leaden box containing the compacted ashes to the captain of the CSS Saul Minionman, outward bound to the planet Assawompsett. Before the starship left our solar system, the captain launched the remains of Victor Remillard on an impact trajectory into the sun.

That seemed to be that … until Fury’s creature, the Hydra, fed for the first time in 2051, and it seemed that Vic had somehow been reborn.

Brett Doyle McAllister, Catherine Remillard’s husband, was Hydra’s first victim. His body was hideously charred, and along the spine and on the head were seven peculiar ashen patches like intricately drawn wheels or flowers: chakra symbols. In Kundalini Yoga the chakras are subtle force-centers that are intimately connected to the vital lattices infusing the human body. But what had been done to Brett had no basis in pranic healing or any other ancient discipline; it was instead a kind of metapsychic vampirism that only one person was ever known to have used before.

Victor.

In 2013 I was an eyewitness when he murdered Shannon O’Connor, whose body was branded like Brett’s. Hours later, Shannon’s villainous father, Kieran O’Connor, was killed in an identical manner when he tried to foil Vic’s plans on the night of the Great Intervention. Only a handful of people, all nonoperant save for Denis and me, ever realized that Vic had killed O’Connor and his daughter in a completely unique manner, by draining their lifeforce through the chakra points.

When Brett McAllister was murdered in the same way, Victor had been dead for eleven years.

Hydra, Fury’s agent, was to remain nameless for some time to come; but the next action that could be directly attributed to Brett McAllister’s killer was an attempt on the life of Margaret Strayhorn, the wife of the famous metapsychic scholar and politician Davy MacGregor. She was attacked later that same year, 2051, while attending a dinner party at the home of Dartmouth College’s president, Tom Spotted Owl. Margaret survived the assault,
but a single distinctive chakra burn on top of her head linked her assailant to that of Brett.

Two months later, Margaret Strayhorn disappeared from her apartment in Concilium Orb, the administrative center of the Galactic Milieu, apparently a suicide. There was only a single clue that hinted at murder: her farspoken cry,
Five
, which her husband perceived at the moment of her death. Davy MacGregor was convinced that whoever had attacked Margaret before had finally managed to kill her and destroy her body completely.