The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (15 page)

Mr. Shea half covered his mouth and said to Royce
sotto voce
, "Don't act too impressed. It's just an atrium and it's roughly as shitty as the rest of this place."

Royce lighted a cigarette, unsure whether to be depressed or relieved that this assignment was about to enter the books in the loss column. He handed the cigarette to Coyne and lighted another for himself, then rose to follow Mr. James and Mr. Shea. The group meandered through a series of dim, unrefined corridors decorated with ubiquitous potted ferns and bland still-life prints and lifeless seascapes. Anonymous doors shut off what Royce guessed to be dark, empty spaces.

The atrium was mundane as Mr. Shea promised. Rain sizzled on cracked and worn tiles of the concave floor and collected in a puddle. Gnats hummed in Royce's ears, bit his neck. He tried to stay dry by standing in the shadows of the marble columns.

Mr. James said to Coyne, "This land was once owned by a Canadian whose family did quite well in textiles. A Japanese consortium acquired the facilities in, what was it? Ninety-five, ninety-six—?"

"Ninety-six," Mr. Shea said. "The Yakuza bought the deed. God knows what went on in the back rooms, eh?" He made slicing motions with his hand.

"It was not the fucking Yakuza," Mr. James said. "The Yakuza operate in Japan, anyway. It was a group of Japs from Okinawa."

"This looks like a nice place for second tier entertaining," Coyne said.

"Exactly!" Mr. James jabbed with his cigar. "One of our clients gets rowdy, it cleans up easy enough—"

"And nobody stays in the hotel in the winter, so you could scream your lungs out if you wanted," Mr. Shea said.

Mr. James led them past the atrium and along a covered walk. The walk let into a garden. The garden contained a sand pit and shrubbery, a Koi pond and some marble benches. Wood slats bobbed in the pond and Royce thought it must be a fish trap for the Koi. Bamboo closed off three sides of the area, and beyond that were dim contours of a wall. The group halted at the edge of the garden under an eave.

"Hawthorne, I want to commend you," Mr. James said. "I'd been under the impression you were squandering our time and money on this snipe hunt of yours—"

"Yeah, we thought you came for the whores and the liquor and free rent!" Mr. Shea said, and laughed. "Sorry, pal. Don't hold it against us, we get freeloaders and bums galore in this biz. I'm sure you understand."

Royce wasn't certain he understood anything. He glanced at Coyne, couldn't gauge the man's reaction. "Right," he said.

"But look, Hawthorne. Pointing us to the woman . . .that was brilliant. And subtle," Mr. Shea said.

"Almost
too
subtle," Mr. James said.

"Yes, almost too subtle," Mr. Shea said. "You could've been a bit more direct. Nonetheless, who are we to question the methods of a consummate professional such as yourself?"

"Quite right." Mr. James tossed his empty glass into the bushes.

Coyne looked from face to face. His was the expression of a man who'd missed the punch line of a joke. "Royce, what's this he's saying?"

"Don't worry about it," Royce said. His smile was a blank as he tried to get a handle on what the hell was happening here. He automatically stepped slightly away from Mr. James and Mr. Shea and tried to locate the goons lurking somewhere behind them.

"What's that?" Coyne stepped into the garden and focused on the pond. Slapping and snorting came from the water and the pieces of wood wobbled side to side.

"You are one smooth operator," Mr. Shea said to Royce. "We haven't figured out how the CIA let her sneak off the reservation—"

"Oh, but we will," Mr. James said. "And we're going to see who's been feeding her information." He glanced meaningfully at Coyne's back. Coyne had walked to the pond and was standing at the edge, staring into the water. "She's just the mule. We still need the traitor who ripped us off in the first place."

"Look at this bullshit." Mr. Shea passed Royce a handful of government-issue identification cards. The cards were partially melted, their lettering and photographic portraits distorted by bubbling and scorch marks. Royce instantly knew them. "The broad's like Lon Chaney. She's got a name and look for every occasion. CIA cut her loose six years ago and she's been freelancing ever since, near as we can figure. She went to the dark side."

"One of our people in Taiwan was able to put the finger on her, too. Treacherous bitch." Mr. James' bloody eyes seemed to distend with the force of his anger.

Royce pretended to study the pictures on the cards and tried to compute, to wrestle the implications. He felt strangely weightless after only the one drink. The pink and black fog seeped into his thoughts. It was never far away these days.

They were in a little metal box nearly ruined by fire. Where did I put the box? In the safe. Are you sure? Yeah, I'm sure
. For the life of him, for the sake of his sanity, he couldn't dredge up any recollection of handing the evidence, such as it was, over to Mr. Shea or Mr. James.
Get a grip, Hawthorne—you think you've got a split personality? You think your evil twin dropped the dime on her and left you in the dark? You aren't the Manchurian Candidate. They broke into your place and heisted the box. There's your answer to the mystery. When's the last time you even checked?
But he'd checked last night, hadn't he? He'd awakened from tossing and dreaming of Shelley Jackson's supple body opening for him, and retrieved the sooty box from his safe and spread all her pieces of false ID on his bed. How long had he feverishly arranged and rearranged those cards, trying to assemble the puzzle? Nobody had stolen into his room. Nothing so simple was at play here.
Is this how it feels to go off the deep end? Ah, come off it—you've been total whack for a while
.

Coyne screamed and startled everyone. He lurched from the pool, cast a terrified look at Royce and ran headlong into the bushes. Saplings whapped and shook with his passage. He clambered over the wall and was gone.

"Where does he think he's going?" Mr. James said to Mr. Shea.

Mr. Shea shrugged and sipped his drink. "Boy's got a guilty conscience."

The cards dropped from Royce's fingers. He walked along the path to the Koi pond and its ominous splashing; the commotion of too many fish in a confined space. There were no Koi in the shallow pond, but instead a rectangular cage of woven bamboo. A body trapped in the coffin-shaped cage was completely submerged except for an oval of mouth and nose. The splashes were caused by the person struggling to arch his or her back in order to keep breathing. The person's skin was withered and gray and beginning to slough, rendering their features unrecognizable.

"She'll tell all," Mr. Shea called with raucous good humor.

Royce wanted to sit. He tried to speak, to formulate a question, a protest, anything. Bubbles foamed over the person's face as they gasped and thrashed.

"You should lie down," Mr. Shea said in his ear.

"Rest a while. You're nearly finished," Mr. James said in his other ear.

How can anybody move so fast?
Royce began to turn and then they pulled a hood over his eyes.

Rain clouds rolled back as daylight ebbed. Royce didn't know how long he'd been staring out the window at the panoptic expanse of twilit countryside. The car purred, leaving the ocean and the mangrove thickets below, following the road into the foothills, returning to the distant city. Highway lights flickered to life.

Mr. Jen drove. His black suit and sallow flesh were grainy-blue with shadow. He watched Royce in the rearview mirror more than he appeared to watch the road.

"You in on it?" Royce said, resting his cheek against the window. The ocean slid away while the subtropical forest closed, its green wall holding back a great darkness. "You in it, Jen? You in on it?" He didn't really care if Mr. Jen was in on the vast conspiracy against the sanity of one Royce Hawthorne.

Mr. Jen stared at Royce. He didn't glance from the mirror even as the car tracked around a sharp corner and a truck rushed past them in the opposite lane with a horn blare and the clang of a trailer jouncing on pavement.

Royce laughed and hunted in his pockets until he recovered his cigarettes. He lighted the last one. "Yeah, you're in on it, all right."

Chu said, "Stupid Yankee." He'd come from nowhere to share the backseat. "Do you have any idea how long it lasts?" He cuffed Royce. "Do you have any idea?"

"No," Royce said, shrinking away.

"Idiot. Fool. That's why they call it the Drink of Forgetfulness. Still, the wheel goes round and round, my Yankee friend. Forgetfulness wears thin and atonement must follow. They've a chamber for every trespass, you see."

"Eighteen," Royce said. "Eighteen."

"I was in the Chamber of Wind and Thunder for seven lifetimes. And now I'm here and I can't say which is worse—the injury or the insult."

"I'm dead." There was the answer, elegant in its simplicity. Royce drew on his cigarette and nodded in morbid celebration. "Or I'm comatose in a country hospital and this is a hallucination. You aren't even real, Chu."

Chu cackled and the fine bones of his face lent him an aspect of profound cruelty. There was a stiletto in his hand like magic and he stabbed Royce in the arm. "Do you feel dead, you fucking moron?" He said to Royce's cry of anguish. "Don't you get it? Everybody lives in hell."

Royce clutched his arm, knew even as the blood seeped into the crook ofhis elbow, the wound was minor, which helped, although not much. Chu seemed happy enough with the result. He made the knife disappear and looked away, out the window into the forest.

Just ahead, a steep grade carried the road into the mouth of a tunnel. The car zoomed in and the world went black. The only illumination was the red glow from Royce's cigarette where it warmed the window glass. The car stopped without braking, without any sense of deceleration whatsoever, and hung in weightless space.

And he was in his apartment, seated before the destroyed TV with the blue light of evening coming through the window, soft as a cloud. The power was down and it would be dark soon.

He finished his cigarette, took his sweet time, and when it was done he went into the silent hall and walked down the stairs and crossed the quadrangle. A group of kids ran in circles at the opposite end, shrieking and laughing and rehearsing their eventual death scenes. The pool man leaned over the water, fishing for leaves and dung with his net. He watched Royce go. There were more children in the far stairwell; they hid in the corners and the space beneath the stairs and their overlarge heads wagged on straw necks and they clutched bellies swollen with hunger. He knew the ravenous ghosts had no business with him and ignored the croaks and groans, the restless snick of claws on cement, the strangled click of saliva in constricted throats.

Coyne's door was open.

"Hello, Aunt CJ," Royce said, standing at the threshold. He dug his fingers into the frame, half-expecting the world to tilt and drop him into an abyss of starry sky.

"Is that who you see when you gaze upon me?" Mrs. Ward said. "How tragically ordinary." She swung her bone-white face back to Coyne's body, which lay supine and still, and continued to roll him into a ball and stuff him into her filthy burlap sack. Coyne seemed rubbery, deflated, little more than a sack himself. But his mouth worked soundlessly, his eyes were wet and it was possible he saw Royce there in the doorway.

"Who are you?" Royce said, so quietly it was almost a thought.

"I'm your Aunt Carole Joyce, dear."

"The hell you say."

She wheezed and shoved the top of Coyne's head until he disappeared completely into the sack. She bound the neck of the sack in barbed wire and grinned up at Royce, licking her bloody fingers. Darkness filled the room and her white face seemed to float. "We're caretakers. Who are
you
, love?"

He wiped tears from his cheeks, unable to meet her gaze. Her cold hand caressed his shoulder, guided him into the hall. The white iron doors were there: the Chamber of Pounding; the Chamber of Fire; the Chamber of Blood; and the rest. When they came to
his
door he saw what the doorplate said, the judgment rendered of him, and hung his head. Mr. Jen stepped out of a recess in the wall and held the door. His eyes glittered like the carapace of a beetle.

Mrs. Ward squeezed Royce's shoulder. "There are far worse. The Chamber of Black Sloth, for one. Have courage. Everyone comes to this house."

Royce saw flashes of the beast in its cube, the man climbing the mountain of knives, the sawing and the blood, a mob of children with thin necks and fat bellies crawling along the shore of bubbling lakes of tar, and wept.

His chamber was circular and windowless. Tiers of benches ascended in the architectural style of an amphitheater. A large projection screen was centered upon the far wall. Mrs. Ward helped him to his seat of honor and her hand fell from his shoulder as she rejoined the rising darkness. The last of the light drained away and it grew cold.

Whispers and small rustlings circulated as the screen glowed faintly and reflected the patina of a scarred lens. Numbers reversed toward the beginning. So many numbers, so many beginnings, his heart became wooden in his chest.

From nearby, Shelley Jackson said, "These are your lives, Royce Hawthorne."

Royce tried to smile through tears, but it cracked to pieces and he shook as grief and sorrow claimed him. The images on the screen blurred, became incomprehensible, and that was a small blessing. "I understand now," he said. He inhaled and pushed his thumbs deep into the corners of his eyes, and pulled.

BULLDOZER

1.

—Then He bites off my shooting hand.

Christ on a pony, here's a new dimension of pain.

The universe flares white. A storm of dandelion seeds, a cyclone of fire. That's the Coliseum on its feet, a full-blown German orchestra, a cannon blast inside my skull, the top of my skull coming off.

I better suck it up or I'm done for.