The Light is the Darkness (9 page)

“Yeah. Makes me wonder what she traded instead.” Conrad hefted the cloth bundle, weighed it in a final calculation. He rose and handed the manuscript to Souza. He smiled a loose, friendly smile, having decided to kill the chemist at his next opportunity.

Souza grinned and fondled his prize. “Perhaps you’ll have the opportunity to ask her. I think this would be an unhappy outcome. I think you would be better served to slink away into the night and forget her, forget Dr. Drake.”

Night had fallen. The lamp clicked off and they sat silently in the perfect darkness of the motel room. A tongue of red and black flame rolled from Souza’s long fingernail and made his expression wicked in the shadow play. He said, “Boy, I could walk into the dark and you’d never see me again. I could reach across the small space between us and take your heart from your chest, devour it like an apple while you stared in amazement. The strong devour the weak and grow stronger. Your Quixotic impulse amuses me, however. Also, Dr. Drake would be mightily offended were I to gobble his special provender. So, I restrain myself. I simply wanted you to know I could. I really could.” He closed his hand and the fire went out. “Shall we go, boy? Shall we go and introduce you to the Great Dark?”

X

The Rattlesnake Animal Clinic was a dead black rectangle off an unpaved street. A solitary lamp illuminated the service entrance, the merciless grilles of several parked cars. The night wind smelled of radiator fluid and cooked insects. Occasionally dust spattered the lamp while deformed tumbleweeds careened by on their migratory paths to oblivion.

Inside the blistered stucco and cement, the lair of knocking pipes and quiescent wires, at the very heart of the squalid box, was Operating Room #2. Brutal, fluorescent light seeped beneath the rumpled seal of the double doors. A radio played dim, unintelligible music, distorted the ebb and flow of whispered conversation.

The light snuffed. A man began to shriek.

XI

Time is a ring,” Imogene said. “Bye, bye.”

Conrad missed her already.

They want in. They want in. They love you, Connie.

“Super collage. Supercollider. The Drake Technique in action. There is no center and the edges are telescopic.”

The walls were dirty. How could a clinic be so dirty. Flies circled a bulb, crawled on the dangling chain. Somebody was shrieking to the accompaniment of an opera diva.

“Daddy, I’m scared,” Ezra said.

“Me too,” Dad said. The coffin lowered, then the dirt.

Conrad was scared also, but he couldn’t speak. His mouth was full of blood.

“Please look at these cards. What do you see? Quickly.”

Thumb whorls. Faces. Hell. A light bulb attended by flies. “Daddy?”

“Oh, you’ve been practicing the meditations. The Occultus Tyrranis suffers from mistranslation. It is often a bald forgery and to follow the instructions of such a tract leads to abiding misery and most gruesome consequences. Your copy is not a forgery, but you will dwell in abiding misery all the same, I think.”

“Hold his head, amigos. This will turn our friend inside out.”

The injection was delivered by an eighteen gauge needle, the kind of needle vets stick in horses, and it slid directly into Conrad’s spine.

“Hold still, my friend,” the Brazilian said. “This is going to hurt.”

It hurt.

Funny thing how most of them didn’t possess names. The
Brazilian
; the
Slovakian
; the
Russian
. Conrad was the
American
now that the former
American
was pushing daisies.

“Time is a ring, the muscle that moves the eye. Time is the sun, a ring, a mouth, a white howl in a black mouth. Time feeds on itself.”

Faces, opened. Flowers, flies. A light bulb spat and went dark. Its filament glowed like tines of the Devil’s trident.

The elk-horned man laughed and laughed through an unhinged jaw. His face was milk. He loomed above the fig trees, slapped aside their wooly branches as he came cackling. And his phallus was a medieval pike striking sparks.

“The whole shebang is utterly theoretical,” Mom said as she notched up the engine full throttle. “Go Mariners!” Her canvas-topped Supercub slowly nosed into the cliffs, folded itself to an orange ball of confetti.

Bang. The universe collapsed into a particle.

“Time runs in all directions. Time is a droplet of blood crashing into a linoleum tile. Time is a nosebleed.”

“So, Conrad. I must warn you that there are certain risks associated with this procedure. Basically, a sequence of chemical alterations will occur. A fundamental reordering of your essential components. Also, conceivably, worms could eat your brain. Shall we proceed, yes?”

“If you’re screaming, you’re alive.”

Conrad was screaming. The crowd was screaming.

The Slovakian with the devil tattoos, the replica Bronze Age helmet with spikes and horns and the replica Bronze Age bow, shot him in the leg with a barbed arrow. Felt as if a Clydesdale had kicked him in the quivering meat six inches north of the knee. The crowd loved it. Its thunder buried him and the chariot came on, a chrome-plated pile driver astride a golden cloud of dust. Cameras whirred and popped.

“They say God dwells outside of Time. He wants to eat us because He is love.”

That horsefucker of a needle rammed into his spine and kept going. It squirted a pure grade-A Cenozoic microbe comet into his blood, and tick, tick, tick.

Supernova. Light bulbs everywhere snuffed as one.

“Please examine the cards. You will be allotted five seconds for each card. Tell me what you see.”

Why were the cards covered in bloody fingerprints? Why did they make him so sick in his stomach? Sinking into the deep, deep black.

“I see. I see. Moths. Holes in the faces.”

“Time feeds itself. Time is a muscle, a mouth. Opening.”

“Stop looking at the cards. Stop.”

“But I can’t stop.”

Every shaking shudder of every hollow-eyed mountain; every slosh and slip of every bottomless cup of sea. Dust and grit filtered down from cracks, unshuttered skylights that looked into abysses.

The universe is colder than Absolute Night, yet is exploding like the blood droplet in its impact. It has begun to bubble.

Siamese twins shook hands and boarded separate cabs.

The Slovakian got a final howl as Conrad’s spear tore him from the chariot and pinned him to the blotted Coliseum sand, before the angry hyenas ate his hands, his feet, before they yanked his manhood into saltwater taffy and the crowd repaired to the bars for cocktails and appetizers, to pay its debts and celebrate with drugs, sex and rock music. Thumbs down.

“Please look into the light. Look only at the light. Now, I am going to say a word. When I say this word, the world as you know it will cease to exist. It will become something new. Are you prepared to become a superhuman, my boy?”

The cathode dilated and spewed ichor of the gods into his veins.

“Listen carefully.”

Interlude

Funny story about the first time Conrad met Marsh and Singh.

The trio collided in Mexico shortly after Imogene originally went missing along with her lover, the esteemed Dr. Raul Lorca. Conrad flew from the Aegean when he received a late night message that she was in deep trouble and needed him to get his ass to Mexico. Genie couldn’t talk, someone watched her every move.
Come quick, bro. I’m in it now
. The line went dead before she gave him her exact location.

He was a mess. The contest had been a team event, a gory recreation of some epic Peloponnesian slaughter. It got ugly, as the big-draw battle royales inevitably did—and he was one of the fortunate few to crawl away with all his original parts. He’d been stabbed and slashed, punctured with an arrow; he had cracked ribs, a bruised larynx and kidneys and was down a few pints of blood despite a transfusion. His body was a purple-black mosaic of stitches and staples. He didn’t closely resemble the smiling face in his passport photo. Other than that he was mint.

Uncle Kosokian had sequestered him in a private hospital with round the clock nurses and a team of nervous physicians. They doped him to the gills on painkillers, gave him a button to push whenever he wanted another shot of morphine and it wasn’t enough, so he downed all the tequila he could lay hands on, which was a supply limited only by his capacity to swallow.

Imogene had terrible timing, but he rolled with it, unhooked himself from the needles and tubes, lined his pockets with pill-bottles, and went hunting.

The next two weeks were a blur, a chain of blackouts. Amid the nightmarish smog of pain, Jose Cuervo, and Demerol, he managed to trace his sister to a villa on the outskirts of a poor, off season resort town near the U.S. border. Imogene had rented a seedy hacienda with a view of a gulch that served as a dry moat. Past the gulch, spread a sloping panorama of sage, cacti and distant, heat-shimmered mesas. What had she and Lorca been doing? Nobody had an answer, not even the Bureau. Evidently she’d taken a leave of absence and zoomed off to pursue some top-secret agenda and probably get herself fired once and for all.

Conrad had a sneaking idea what she was after. What to do about it was another matter.

None of the townies knew anything helpful. Folks remembered the dark-haired gringa. She talked like a man and broke the eye of a farmer who’d pinched her ass while they shot pool at the cantina. She carried a pistola and drank from the bottle and the regulars figured right away she was a Fed, probably a customs agent, or a narc. They didn’t give a damn; obviously she had bigger fish to fry than hassling any of the locals. When she stopped coming in, it wasn’t a surprise. She’d paid down another month on the hacienda and the maid reported that some of her personal items were still inside. The only thing missing was her, and her car, which turned out to be a rental from the airport in Mexico City. The authorities eventually discovered the car at the bottom of a quarry, demolished by a crash and the ensuing fire. None of the charred bones inside the wreckage belonged to Imogene or her biologist companion Lorca, however.

Naturally, enterprising locals had stripped the hacienda of everything that wasn’t nailed down. It didn’t matter. Conrad spotted her subtle knife blaze on a living room post—an inverted arrow bisecting a heart containing: CONNIE & GENIE FOREVER. She’d hidden the important stuff in a garbage bag in the crawl space. It was exactly as she’d promised to do if something like this occurred—articles of clothing; travel brochures; sundry papers and receipts; traveler’s checks; a plastic bag of Humboldt County Thunderfuck and loose .38 slugs; and a scorched envelope containing the partially exposed glossy of a man in a robe wearing a crown of antlers. Great, pointy antlers; a twelve-point buck for sure, or the world’s biggest stag beetle. The man’s face was in shadow, except for the rim of a widened, protuberant eye, all black, and the corner of a too-large mouth skinned back to reveal a pit. Imogene had printed Drake in the bottom corner. Not much of a likeness, not to Conrad’s recollection of the smarmy old salt who’d tended Ezra. Then a couple of film canisters and a thick packet of dossier-style photographs of various old men, their names and occupations and last known addresses meticulously typed on the reverse—none of whom seemed familiar; and a smaller collection of satellite plates of the Cloister in the Pyrenees.

There was also a book, a medieval pamphlet made of crinkly animal skin that smelled of must and dried blood. Untitled. The shell of some kind of large arthropod had been embedded in the wooden cover. The tract’s leathery pages were covered border to border in ancient Greek text, except for periodic diagrams of esoteric anatomical surgeries, and more embedded exoskeletons of predatory insects.

Imogene left a note on a scrap of soiled stationary with flowers and rabbits. It said, in jagged script,
They want in
.

Conrad was far too addled to analyze the particulars of the clues, or whether any clues truly existed beyond the miasma and warp of his beleaguered perceptions. He wandered around the town, dropped ominous and inflammatory comments and set up shop at the hacienda. Maybe she would return, or if she couldn’t return, she’d realize where he’d be and send a message; or, perhaps, when he’d recovered his wits, he’d discover some new scrap that she’d left behind. Mostly he stayed because he didn’t know where else to go or what to do if he went there. As a precaution, he rented a deposit box at the bank and stashed Imogene’s clues for safekeeping.

He hibernated, rousing occasionally for more tequila and pills. He listened to cockroaches and mice as they scuttled around his stinking, sodden bulk, and fat moths battening the dust-caked windows, thirsty for his salt and iron, his deadly sweat. Sometimes, through the grubby window notch, the sky flushed red as the skin of a balloon stretched to bursting. Titanic shadows moved behind the sun, the gaping moon. Dark shapes dimpled the red sky as fingertips denting cellophane. When Conrad dozed, Drake materialized in a bell of smoky, volcanic light, shook his mighty antlers and beckoned from the yawning archway of a cathedral. A giant in foul, sooty robes.