He giggled at his own joke. Great. The psycho had a sense of humor.
“You’ve been a lovely competitor,” he added. “Tell me, I’m curious. This little contest of wits…in your mind, did you frame it as a chess metaphor or a more physical battle, like a boxing match?”
“Chess,” I said. No reason to lie.
He smacked his palms together, a merry little golf clap, then hugged his knees tight.
“I thought you might. We’re a good match. And I’m not much inclined toward the martial arts, I’m afraid.” He held out his arms to his sides. His oversize coat draped over him like a bedsheet on a scarecrow. “I realize I don’t look like much. You must be disappointed. You have to understand that where I come from, nine out of ten children die before their third birthday. I was the runt of my litter, but I survived. ‘Healthy’ is a very relative word.”
“Where’s that? Somewhere in the third world?”
“Not your third world,” he said with a smile. “You are aware there are more worlds, in the literal sense, than this, yes?”
I was aware, all right. Twenty years ago, a black-budget science team inside Ausar Biomedical carried out a string of interdimensional incursions. They didn’t like what they found. From what one of the survivors told me, they’d opened windows onto plenty of other Earths, parallel to ours, and most of the locals were anything but friendly.
They’d also found a place that looked a hell of a lot like the Garden of Eden. Abandoned, choked with cancerous and cannibalistic horrors, and toxic to human life. That survivor I interviewed realized the experiments were going too far; he tried to stop his former partners and managed to unleash something even worse in the process. He opened a crack in the prison world where the Enemy had been banished, and set the bastard loose.
“So how does a guy from a parallel Earth end up on this one?” I asked.
“Talent.” Elmer giggled again. “As a young man I was banished from my village. I had a natural affinity for the occult arts, and I was foolish, too eager. Well, that, and my early experiments mostly centered around stealing the other children’s health to sustain my own. I was present at one too many crib deaths, and rosy-cheeked when our village was suffering crop rot and drought.”
“You’re lucky they just banished you.”
“Oh, far from it. Burning me at the stake would have been a more merciful punishment. I was cast into the wastes of a poisoned, afflicted world, without food or water. Soon I came upon the bones of a city, infested with the insatiable vermin we called ‘gravers’—the wilding dead. But they had what I needed to live, and my spirit was not so broken as my body. I found that by coating myself in the rotten viscera of corpses and working a few charms, I could pass among them unscathed. With more practice, more experience, I could tame their animal minds and make them obey me.”
“Did you teach ’em to roll over and shake hands?” I asked. “I suppose ‘play dead’ wasn’t an option.”
“I taught them, and they taught me. I was all alone in a kingdom of death. More of a playground, really. I immersed myself in decay as a survival tactic at first, but soon I understood the true beauty of rot. Decomposition is part of the cycle of nature, every bit as essential as growth. And one comes from the other. Did you know, with proper cultivation and care, certain flowers can actually grow upon corpses? It’s wondrous to behold.”
“I’m starting to see why they put you in charge of a garbage plant.”
He grinned, wide, showing off yellowed and broken teeth.
“I wore a ceremonial robe made of human skin, my face smeared with a dead man’s entrails, as I led the charge upon my former home. I punished the villagers for casting me out, then added their reanimated bodies to my ranks. We preyed on merchant caravans after that, mostly. A winning tactic until I ransacked a pilgrim train. They were escorting a safe filled with strange artifacts, including a knife made of a metal I’d never seen before. No wonder, as it turned out. It wasn’t from my world. And then, on the dark of the moon, its owners came to reclaim their stolen property.”
“The Network,” I said. I had reason to believe the organization’s reach stretched across parallel worlds. Now I had the proof.
Which didn’t mean a thing if I died here tonight. Behind my back, my fingers slowly eased toward my belt, and the hidden handcuff key.
“Indeed,” Elmer said. “They could have killed me out of hand, but my work impressed them. I never stopped experimenting, you see. Occult transmutations to reshape life—and death—into new and more useful forms. The Network saw value in my designs. You’re already familiar with one of them, I believe.”
“Am I?”
In response, he nodded at the air just above my left shoulder. I held my breath, tasting the chamber’s stench, as I squirmed in the chair and looked behind me.
The pit at my back, with the legs of my chair perched on the edge of its yellow-painted rim, offered a sheer drop into a pool of rotting garbage. Trash bags had burst at the bottom, moldy food and waste spilling from their glossy black skin, mingling with heaps of wet cardboard boxes and smears of rancid grease.
A sheet of cardboard moved. Lifting, just a little, as a mottled brown cockroach the size of my fist squirmed out from underneath. Its mandibles twitched at the air, as if it could sense me watching it.
It let out a rattling, wet hiss and squirmed back under cover. More hisses rose up, joining the roach chorus, as the entire pit of garbage began to quiver and move.
15.
“I crafted my pets from raw clay,” Elmer told me, “but the Network—they saw their true potential. For an organization whose survival depends on secrecy, what could be more useful than a parasite that can compel one’s silence?”
I turned from the pit, fighting to ignore the hissing, squirming sounds echoing up from the shadows. I had to get out of here, but right now I needed to keep Elmer talking while I figured out an escape plan.
“Which is why all the Network’s flunkies have them,” I said. “They can’t rat you out when they’ve got a magic roach nestled in their guts.”
“We started with the lowest levels of our outer cells, yes. A proof-of-concept run, to make sure there were no long-term side effects. And I’m pleased to say it’s been a smashing success. We’re ready to move to phase two.”
I shook my head. “Meaning?”
“Oh, Dan.” He looked disappointed. “Use your imagination. My pets don’t just compel silence, they compel obedience. Anyone, with a parasite and a little hypnotic conditioning, can be turned into a Network asset. If done properly, they don’t even know they’ve been turned.”
“Anyone.” The skin of my chest prickled as the implication dawned on me. “Or everyone.”
“Now you get it. Alas, it’s not to be so. Not in the short-term. My pets don’t reproduce as quickly as the roaches of your world. Their incubation period is nearly a year long, and all attempts to modify them for faster breeding have failed utterly. We simply can’t mass-produce the little beauties, let alone keep up with demand. Yet, anyhow. Phase two is about targeting more valuable hosts. Setting our sights a bit higher than the rabble we have pushing our narcotics.”
Behind my back, my fingers felt along the rim of my belt. I’d done this move more times than I could count under Bentley’s guidance. Theoretically, it was simple: dip my fingertips behind my belt, pry the tiny key loose from the blob of putty holding it in place, twist it around, and unlock my cuffs.
With an audience watching me like a hawk, that theory fell apart. Any hint that I was doing something suspicious—my shoulders shifting, my forearms wriggling—would give me away. I had to be slow, glacier slow, my every move perfectly natural.