The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (12 page)

Agatha bared her teeth, glared blindly. She opened a service door inset between the entry arch and a shrub, and the women filed through into darkness. She went last, leading the youth by his wrist; the boy half hopped, half staggered. The door shut behind them, its edges vanishing neatly as the edges of a spider's trap.

"Oh my God." Royce blinked water from his lashes. "I've seen them down here a few times, but I never got a good look at . . .Was that the—what did you call it?"

"Yeah," Coyne said. "What've I been saying? The old broads are effing creepy."

"Who the hell was the kid with them?"

"I dunno about the kid. One of those kinky buggers from a sex club, I bet. The witches are gonna use him in a fertility rite. 'Course their snatches likely got cobwebs growing in 'em, so a lotta good it'll do."

"You're kidding. You mean they fuck him?"

"Who knows? Why not? This is the East, my friend. Freaky shit all around us, all the time."

Royce tasted acid. He found a cigarette and spent a few long moments lighting it in the rain. His hand shook. "My brother was a swimmer. Good body, like that kid."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Search and rescue diver for the Coast Guard." Royce nodded and dragged on his cigarette until the smoke scorched his lungs and he came up gasping. "He died. Good looking kid. Left a lot of girls crying." They sat like that for a while. Finally, Royce said, "God, that's too weird for me. Where'd they go?"

"Huh? Inside."

"I know they went inside. I thought they usually went out, into the community."

"What, you think the bus to the casino runs this late? Ask the schmucks at the gate if you wanna know." Coyne chuckled bitterly and splashed his foot. "Who cares, man? Who gives a shit, anyway? Aren't you sick of this place yet? A party every night. Rich slants with bad skin and worse teeth holding court. Buncha effing hyenas. Give a brother a drag?"

Royce handed him the cigarette. He immediately thought of long-lost Chu and the honking brays of laughter; of the mainland business partners who'd attended the dinner, the slyly insouciant glances they'd shot Shea and James, these latter worthies grown sleek and sanguine with food and wine, and complacency; wild pigs softened from their more vicious natures. "Hyenas and boars," he said. "And not a lion in sight."

Soon it grew cool and they were out of cigarettes. Each mumbled his farewells and tottered off to bed. Royce lay on his back, still dressed in his soaked clothes and shivering from a chill. In the twilight divide between waking and dreaming, he replayed the bizarre tableaux at the pool a hundred times. The boy looked over his shoulder and Royce met his brother's eyes, his frightened cow eyes . . .

The next Saturday mixer got started earlier than usual. Royce straggled in from a meeting with his local support crew and saw a crowd gathered near the entrance to the ballroom and community annex. He slipped through to his apartment and laid out some casual evening wear and then took a quick shower, contemplating the merits of making an appearance downstairs.

An email message from an unknown sender blinked in the inbox when he climbed from the shower; it had been piped through a secondary account known only to his handlers in Atlanta. He opened the message with a laptop reserved for correspondence that might compromise the sensitive documents on his primary computer. Encryptions were made to be broken; such was the axiom of a journeyman intelligence officer he'd interned under after college. Royce kept four computers on the premises, each with a specific backup or decoy function, each protected with the latest and greatest high-tech ciphers the lab boys could devise. Their hard drives could be wiped at the press of a key.

The message itself was blank with an attached video file. The label said: M.POE.; D. ANDREWS; J. STEVENS. CHAMBER OF MAGGOTS. His heart began to speed up. Royce clicked it, watched the video begin to load. He lighted a cigarette and went to the terrace. It was a calm evening. People continued to gather around buffet tables set up in the quadrangle. Electric light poured through the open doors of the community annex. Orchestra music from the ballroom and bits of conversation drifted past him, carried toward a surge of stars that blazed through breaks in the omnipresent smog. The Saturday mixer was generally a muted affair, an attraction for the geriatric set and a few young lonely singles. Agatha Ward had secured a sextet from the philharmonic and it had drawn this lively crowd of suits and dresses, among these an amazing number of couples who hadn't yet achieved the half-century mark.

He crushed out his cigarette, returned to the computer, sat patiently until the video loaded and a slightly unfocused image flickered on the monitor: black and white, interrupted by wavery lines and occasional fuzz; probably shot by a security camera.

A garbled voice intoned, "
Those who perform crooked deeds and malpractice are thus served
."

The location appeared to be a large, drab room; a storage area, perhaps. It possessed concrete walls and floor, a dangling bulb swollen with feeble light. The bulb swung gently, casting shadows at weird angles. A trio of figures stood in a loose triangle near the center of the room; Royce couldn't discern their genders because of the bad lighting and the individuals' voluminous garb. They wore heavy robes or dresses; their faces were obscured by cowls.

What the hell is this?
He didn't like it for several reasons, not the least of which being the anonymity of the sender. This, and the footage with its isolated stage and motionless actors, the enigmatic intention of whoever lurked behind the camera, evoked a sense of creeping dread. Several minutes passed and the image remained static. Royce glanced at his watch, considered calling it quits and catching the tail end of the party. Agatha Ward had left an invitation suggesting Shelley Jackson would be in attendance. The prospect appealed to him despite the utter lack of encouragement Jackson had shown him thus far. He couldn't bear the idea of being alone with this eerie video. It reminded him too much of the last bizarre film he'd stumbled across, the one that precipitated, or was a product of, a delusional episode. He reached for the escape key.

The picture stuttered, shifted to a different camera angle, this one slightly off center and much closer to the figures. From this new, extreme perspective, he perceived minute twitches of hands and limbs, the abrupt shudder of a torso. Small chunks of something dislodged and fell. Straining to comprehend the bizarre nature of the image, a very bad thought occurred to him. He located his seldom used bifocals, unfolded them and slid them over his nose.

He trembled to realize from a telltale sliver of reflected light the figures were suspended from the ceiling by slender wires that terminated at their necks. He couldn't detect how these wires were attached.

A hangman's noose? A fishing hook in the spine? A film school prank?
Their robes, their cowls, gray-white through the cheap lens, were not cloth at all, but rather colloidal masses of rice slathered to naked flesh. The rice squirmed upon them like a living, bloated thing. More gray-white pudding spread around the feet of the triad, flowing up from drains in the concrete floor. The closest figure raised an emaciated arm in a weak, swiping gesture at its face, and a charcoal-dark eye yawed wildly. The video ended.

M. Poe. Manichev Poe, the Balkan investment banker he'd seen at the Rover with Shelley Jackson. Manichev Poe of the open-collared shirts and long, black hair. He'd never heard of Andrews or Stevens. Doubtless they'd committed the sin of crooked deeds as well.

Royce swallowed hard and wondered briefly if he was going to be sick. He chewed on his knuckle. Once the fogs partially receded, he initiated the protocol to wipe the hard drive. Then he lifted the computer and carried it into the bathroom and smashed it repeatedly in the tub until only bits of circuit board and snags of wire remained.

The phone beeped for God knew how long before he shrugged off his daze and picked up. The line was dead by then and the display logged the caller as anonymous. He decided to fix a drink, but the scotch was gone and the last beer too; even the mini bottles of Christian Brothers he kept in the pantry, with the oatmeal, flour, and mouse traps.

Royce walked downstairs without recollection of forming the intent to leave his apartment. Full dark had come and the sodium lamps kicked on, masking the faces of the guests in shades of red and amber. He scooped several glasses of champagne from an unattended platter, retired to one of the small tables, and drank rapidly and with little pleasure.

Agatha Ward waded toward him, Shelley Jackson in tow. "Mr. Hawthorne! I presume you remember Miss Jackson. I'm thrilled you decided to join us."

"Everybody was having such a swell time, I couldn't resist." He rose unsteadily and nodded at Shelley Jackson. "A pleasure to see you again."

Shelley Jackson was dressed in a mohair sweater. She radiated ennui. "I'm sure. Well, Agatha, thanks for the party. I've an early flight to Beijing—"

"Why don't you dears visit a moment while I attend to some crashingly dull social niceties?" Mrs. Ward smiled with implicit cruelty at the younger woman, ducked and bobbed in pantomime, and retreated.

"Damn it," Shelley Jackson said. She snapped her fingers at a melancholy waiter in a tuxedo jacket and bade him fetch her a double bourbon, neat. She downed it without a wince, eyed Royce hatefully, and demanded the bottle. She said to Royce, "Where'd we meet, anyway?"

"At that Mandarin place, the other night—"

"Yeah, right. The guy threw up on you." She chuckled, low and nasty. "Nice. I've seen you around, haven't I?"

"I live right up there." He pointed, but she didn't follow his gesture, concentrated on her bottle. The champagne was hitting him hard now; his cheeks were numb and he had to carefully enunciate. He plunged recklessly ahead and killed another glass, pouring it down his throat to stifle the sense of misery and helplessness.

"
Love
your hair," she said.

"Thanks," Royce said. They stood shoulder to shoulder; close enough he smelled her bath oils, the sweet exhaust of gin on her breath. "Cigarette?"

"No. They ruin your teeth."

He lighted one for himself, suppressed the urge to fidget with his lighter. After the silence between them dragged out, he said, "A mushroom walks into a bar—"

"Oh, shit."

"A mushroom walks into a bar. Sees this gorgeous woman sitting by herself. So he buys her a drink and asks if she'd like to dance. The woman looks him up and down and finally says no thanks. And this mushroom is pretty deflated, so he asks why not. The woman says it's nothing personal, 'I don't dance with mushrooms.' And he says, 'Oh, c'mon, I'm a real fungi!'"

She delicately wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her sweater. "Can you?"

"Dance? Sure. I learned to tango at charm school."

"I meant in your condition. You're pretty shit-faced. Besides, the band's calling it a night."

She was correct; the sextet began to break down their instruments and pack them toward the gatehouse. Royce sighed. "Maybe next time. The Rover has live music on weekends. If you like jazz hits rendered by girls whose English consists of "hello, mister" and most of the words to most of the songs—"

"Here's a better idea: Why don't we nip off to your place and have a nightcap."

"I'm out of stock" he said, trying for a light touch.

"Or better yet, let's skip all the bullshit. I'll get down on my knees and suck your cock. Does that work for you?" She tilted her head to meet his eyes. Her face was smooth and white and luminous.

Royce floundered for an appropriate response; between the horror show of a video, the half-magnum of pink champagne, and the surrealistic conversation, it took several seconds to deduce she'd been toying with him. Heat rushed through his skull and he overcame the nearly overwhelming urge to crack her across the face, to grab her shoulders and shake her until she rattled. His gorge rose; he forced his fingers to unclench. He said, "I suppose you're good with your mouth. James and Shea know talent when they see it, right?"

She chuckled and flipped the bottle underhand. It splashed in the pool. "Nighty-night, sweet prince. Go sleep it off, hey? You stink like a rat."

Rat?
There was a provocative choice of words. Shelley Jackson and Agatha Ward must've compared notes. Maybe they knew something, maybe he'd slipped along the line; his work was art, not a perfect science, and he was far from flawless — especially of late. He was up to his neck in mistakes. For the first time in an age, he wanted to go home, whatever that meant. He could take a vacation, look up some of his college buddies, an old girlfriend or two with whom he hadn't managed to burn every bridge.

"Screw you, bitch. You look like a boy, anyway." Shelley Jackson was too far away to hear, but the morose waiter gave him a pitying look as he came to retrieve the empties. The man used one of the deck chairs to snag the bottle floating in the pool.

Agatha Ward stood near doors to the ballroom in a tight circle, which included the building superintendent, an elegant gentleman named Bertram Harris; Mrs. Tuttle; and several geezers Royce vaguely recognized from around the complex. Mrs. Ward waved to him as he listed for the elevator. Her body rippled and became transparent, revealing her skeleton suspended in its jelly. The bones were too long, too sinuous for a woman of such enormous girth; her spine recoiled like a chain of knives as her skull swiveled to track him. The mirage fanned outward and the crowd was abruptly transfigured into a mobile of skeletal X-rays. For an instant the flesh of his own hand gave way to showcase his finger bones, the metacarpal with its scar and the pins from a long-ago biking mishap in the Pyrenees, the slender tube of forearm—

Royce collapsed into the lift. When the doors parted, he'd gone completely rubbery and had to slide along the wall to his door.
Too much champagne
. Or something more sinister. He'd heard the cautionary tales about Mickeys in the wine, the date rape drugs kidnapers preferred. Worst case scenario, in a few hours Atlanta would receive a call from a disembodied voice demanding X amount for Royce's safe return. Maybe they'd send Atlanta a finger or an ear first, just to set the ground rules. If he worked for the Germans, or the French, or the Italians, there'd be no question about whether they'd cough up the ransom. American companies were more unpredictable. Next time, he'd definitely go with the Italians, just to be on the safe side.