The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (11 page)

Can she know? How in the hell could she?
Royce gulped beer to cover his discomfort and confusion. "I'm hardly a devil, Mrs. Ward. A humble cog in the great machine and no more."

"We know our hell-dwellers, and you are certainly one. Girls?"

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Tuttle said and Mrs. Coyne echoed the sentiment. "A handsome white devil!"

"Don't worry, dear," Mrs. Ward said. "Nothing personal—all white men are devils here. Especially the British and the Canadians. You aren't a Canuck, thank heavens."

"Yeah, thank God for something," Royce said, relaxing slightly.

Lunch petered out after that. Coyne brooded and the old women nattered about cards, shopping and whose kids were doing what. Royce excused himself. Mrs. Ward took his elbow at the door. She said, "You should do more than window shop."

"Excuse me?" Royce said.

"Miss Jackson. The girl in 333. She's very charming. You should take a chance. I think the two of you have common interests. She's a bird watcher."

"I don't understand what you mean, Mrs. Ward." Royce kept smiling, kept playing it cool.
What the hell is your game, lady?

"Don't you?" A shadow crossed her face. Her eyes congealed in their sockets. "Try to join us at one of our weeklies. Miss Jackson has promised to come make the acquaintance of my circle."

"Oh, um, sure. I'll have to drop by, then."

"Yes. Please do that." She released his arm and extended him a motherly pat on the cheek. Her thick, sharp thumbnail pressed lightly into the flesh under the hinge of his jaw and Royce's head swam with the childhood memory of a butcher shop, and the butcher in his ruddy apron sizing up the raw red meat, slapping it with his left hand, bringing the cleaver with the right, and whistling a wry, cheerless tune while customers waited in a line, batting the occasional circling fly with their newspapers, their parasols or panama hats.

Royce said goodbye, and as he escaped into the hall, Mrs. Ward leaned out and said, "Safe travels. Oh, and Mr. Hawthorne, do be careful about answering your door at night, hmm? In this place, you never know who might come calling." She shut the door on his answer.

He'd been combing his stacks of video and photographic material in a mindless evening ritual held over from one of his first cases, when he turned up a cartridge labeled CHU/6. Chu's series of surveillance tapes ended at number five. Royce scratched his head and ran the feed through his television so he could relax in his armchair with the lights turned down.

Right away, he decided he'd definitely made some odd labeling error.

This wasn't a surveillance tape, but rather a homemade documentary. The documentary was filmed on a handheld and the picture shook as the camera operator walked. An old, old heavyset Chinese woman in a nurse's pinafore was giving the unseen narrator a tour of what seemed to be an abandoned sanitarium. She carried a flashlight and swept its watery beam over ceilings that leaked plaster and stringers of wiring. Piles of debris littered the corridor. The corridor was notched by small white iron doors. She stopped at each door, pointed and muttered into the camera. Dubbing was poor and her mouth and the sound from her mouth moved at different speeds.

"Di Yu," the nurse said in a hoarse monotone. "Di Yu. Di Yu."

When the camera zoomed in on her pointing finger, one could resolve metal placards with lettering. 2: CHAMBER OF GRINDING, said one. 8: CHAMBER OF MOUNTAIN OF KNIVES, said another. "Di Yu. Di Yu," the nurse said. Her face was white and soft as dough, except for her eyes and mouth, which were black. "Di Yu. Di Yu." She came to a larger door set into a slab of masonry. The door was barred and heavily corroded by rust. Its placard read: BLACK SLOTH HELL.

"Aunt CJ." Royce was certain. That was his dearly departed Aunt Carole Joyce under the chalky paint. No, no, that wasn't right. It was Mrs. Ward, how could he have missed the malice in her eyes, her awkward gait?

A jumble of misaligned frames heralded a scene change, which slowly resolved as the interior of a room. Darkness prevailed except for a glass cube spotlighted against a black backdrop. The cube was a museum display on the order Royce recognized from childhood visits to the Met, the kind of massive box intended to house dinosaur exhibits. Shadow-figures assembled at the base of the display, dwarfed by its immensity, the sheer girth of the specimen preserved within. He'd seen the animal on a grade school field trip, had seen it since in a dozen evil dreams, this father of cold sweats and night terrors. The thing reared in excess of twenty-feet high; it might've snapped the back of an elephant, torn the tops from trees. Its pelt was oily and black. Its claws were also black and hooked like daggers. The metal tag on the exhibit said:
Megatherium. S. America, ca Pleistocene epoch
.

There was a difference from Royce's personal beast, however. This relic, this patent fabrication, a paleontologist's reconstruction with its artificial fur and sawdust stuffing, was a hybrid of the museum curiosity he'd seen in the tour group with all the other bored sixth graders. Vaguely toadlike, somehow obscene; its shape altered for the worse as shadows moved across its monstrous bulk.

The camera swooped in tight. Dozens of naked men and women pressed against the base, hands splayed and grasping. Their skins sagged and drooped from the relentless gravity of age. More ancients shuffled and crawled from the outer darkness to prostrate themselves before the idol, and in their eagerness to worship, they pressed the first rank and crushed them until blood shot against the glass. The petitioners moaned and their cries echoed the bestial croaks he'd heard in the night outside his door.

Mrs. Ward stood among the mewling throng, her white face and white pinafore shining. "Di Yu. Di Yu." The camera zoomed tighter, tighter, focused upon her mouth, and the tape ended.

Royce's skull felt like an anvil. He rose to make for the bathroom and almost tripped over a body. Before he could yell, lights came up, revealing the bald furnishings of a decrepit theater. The projector was still shuttering, splashing arcane symbols on the screen. A half-dozen filmgoers ignored him as they retrieved jackets and hats and squelched along the seedy aisles toward the exits.

He rushed to the lobby and accosted the girl sweeping popcorn from the carpet. She recoiled from his urgent demands for information. What theater was this? When had he arrived? Who'd brought him here? She spoke no English. Her manager didn't know much English either, was only able to relate the name of the theater—The Monsoon Gallery, which specialized in independent and art films. The man wrung his hands and implored Royce to leave in peace. There was no record of a ticket transaction; perhaps he'd been drinking and stumbled in through the side door, yes? Many fine bars were located nearby, much action! The manager's bewilderment and distress seemed genuine.

Royce gave up haranguing him and wandered into the street. It was nearly eleven pm. According to his watch, he'd misplaced about four hours. He caught a taxi and rode the twenty-odd blocks back to the compound. Unsurprisingly, the security at the gate had no record of his leaving the LRA that evening.

He locked himself in the apartment and searched for the tape. Two hours of ransacking his desk and file cabinets, the dozen or so cardboard boxes jammed in a closet, proved fruitless. In the end, he slumped at the kitchen table and covered his face with his hands. Television laughter came through the vents.

Ming Cho, chief liaison to a mainland conglomerate that contracted Coltech to manufacture jet navigational computers, had invited a bunch of management types to dinner at a Mandarin restaurant. They arrived late because of traffic. Tardiness was a major faux pas in China; fortunately, Ming proved extremely acclimated to Westerners' legendary indiscretions and he cut them some slack. He and his cadre of flunkies arranged an elaborate banquet: music, pretty dancing girls, karaoke.

Marty James climbed on the stage at one point, his three-hundred-dollar haircut mussed from the attentions of the party girls, his tie loosened so it drooped low across his considerable belly, and led the restaurant in a rousing chorus of "Camp Town Races" until he almost pitched head over heels into the front row of diners; Cho and Liu Zhu came to the rescue and dragged him back to the table, the trio red-faced and nearly bawling from exertion and hilarity. Zhu kept refilling his glass, any glass within reach, with rice wine, shouting, "Gombay! Gombay!" the Chinese equivalent of "Bottoms up!" The Americans who responded were dropping like flies. Royce managed a few half-shouted pleasantries with the lovely and alluring Ms. Jackson. Her handshake was warmer than her eyes or her impersonal smile. She'd arrived in a white dress cut down the center and slashed up the flanks and the men seemed to have trouble keeping their mouths shut.

There was an exception, however. About two-thirds of the way through the meal Royce noticed Bill Zander—Billy Zed, the resident Brits called him—staring at the crowd. They'd pulled two tables together and barely had enough room for the whole party. Bill was down at the end. Royce couldn't ask him who he was looking at without shouting. He ignored Bill for a while, but then the junior production manager made an awful expression. It reminded Royce of candid photos taken at amusement parks of people on the rides, some of which were classic studies in human terror and vulnerability.

Such was Bill's expression. His face sagged and his mouth did the same. For a second Royce thought Bill would begin to shriek right there in that packed restaurant.

Oh, God, how much has that silly s.o.b. had to drink?
Royce craned his neck to see what the hell was going on. It seemed as if Bill was staring at a table full of Germans. Nothing odd about those people, except they were drunk and noisy, probably competing with the Coltech crowd. Gradually, he concluded Bill wasn't looking at the other table; he'd focused on a copse of rubber plants: big specimens in ornamental clay pots. The restaurant could've doubled as rainforest on a movie stage; yards of exotic plants, bamboo and hanging vines. Groupers and lobsters drifted in dim aquariums—one picked out one's own dinner and a guy with a net on a pole scooped it up and hustled it into the kitchen. He didn't spot anything particularly unusual and Bill eventually settled down, although he drank enough of the house whiskey to put an Irishman in a coma.

When the party finally staggered outside to load into cabs, he caught Bill's arm and asked if he felt all right. The man was so boozy, he'd gone cross-eyed. Bill clutched Royce's coat and pulled him close and whispered he'd seen something in the rubber plants. He slobbered gibberish on Royce's collar, whimpering about children, terrible little beasts. Bill's expression raised the hairs on the back of Royce's arms.

Shea privately informed him Bill had partaken earlier of some particularly potent Thai grass they'd gotten from a Cambodian in the Mount Victoria region. Allegedly, the stuff carried an LSD-class wallop with a plethora of nasty side effects—including total, all-consuming paranoia. Bill became incomprehensible and started singing pieces of the Chinese pop song he'd mangled during his turn at karaoke. Royce and Shea carried him to the curb. He puked all over his pants and they packed him into the cab. His luckless compatriots protested mightily and tried to pitch him back into the street. They might've succeeded, except Royce and Shea pressed their bodies against the door until the taxi rolled away into the bright scrum of traffic.

Royce offered to share a ride with Shelley Jackson. She raised a brow at the spittle on his collar and declined, joining forces with Shea, James and Cho as they went club-hopping in a company limousine.

Everybody forgot about him standing in the rain before the restaurant exit. There were no more taxis. He stuck his hands in his pockets and let the sidewalk crowd sweep him in the direction of home away from home.

Midnight found Royce and Coyne, a disconsolate pair, lounging poolside. Balmy drizzle cut through the smog, plastered their hair, their clothes, glittered in puddles in the dips of the tiles. Neither of them were particularly sober; however, as Coyne pointed out early on, he wasn't nearly as drunk as he'd have preferred. He'd returned from a black tie affair thrown by some Texas tycoon. The fellow who invited him, a foxy corporate lawyer, disappeared on the arm of some other guy. Aggrieved by this unceremonious treatment, Coyne did his best to decimate the open bar. After a couple loud arguments with better-dressed, better-connected guests, he got tossed into the street by a squad of bull-necked security people and ended up walking two miles back to the safety of the LRA. An ill-advised shortcut through the park resulted in his tripping over a bush and sliding on his ass down a small hill.

He sat with his head lowered, his white shirt splashed with mud, dinner jacket a sodden lump between his feet. He'd removed his shoes and socks and dipped his feet to the pants cuff into the pool water.

Water rolled in its shallow basin, scuffed by the rain and an occasional gust, and slopped over the rim onto the deck. Shelley Jackson's light blinked on and silhouettes moved against the drapes. He cursed, and wondered wherefrom this irrational jealousy.

"Behold!" Coyne said with a sarcastic flourish.

Figures emerged from the building, pale and wan and silent as ghosts. He recognized them: Mrs. Degive from 129, tall and hollow-eyed, her nightgown hung drenched as if she'd crawled from a shipwreck onto some night shore; Mrs. Yarbro and Mrs. Tuttle shuffling together like recently separated Siamese twins; and Mrs. Cardin, tapping with her cane, free hand to the hole in her throat. They gravitated toward the pool, shambling with empty determination (except for poor, crippled Mrs. Grant; she humped along the ground like a centipede): the women bore the witless expressions of sleepwalkers, their spectral forms lighted by undulating reflections from the shallows.

Agatha Ward coalesced near the dense shadows in the courtyard entrance and winded a brief, decadent trill on her panpipe. Her face was dark and convulsed; the face of a medieval goodwife transfixed in agonizing labor. At her side hunched a lean, pale youth, nude but for a pair of goggles on a strap around his neck, and a pair of immodestly snug swim trunks. He stood, eyes to the ground, awkwardly bowed at elbows and knees. His ankles and wrists were apparently bound. His head was shaved and it shone in the eerie light.