The one voice ranted, loud and increasingly animalistic, but the other voice spoke so softly that it wasn’t a voice as much as it was like a conscience, an inner source of moral guidance telling him that he needed to do what he had been tasked to do, that if he did the right thing, he would be happy, content, and at peace. This conscience-like counselor was authoritative, irresistible, therefore not at all like a conscience, which could be ignored, but more like a … controller. Yet as much as Henry wanted to obey, he remained paralyzed because the louder voice bored into him, tore at him, though in a strangely thrilling way, drilling down until it struck nerves in him that didn’t flash with pain when touched but instead flared with pleasure, desires so deeply buried and so beyond his experience that he didn’t have words to describe them.
For a while, the outer world did not press upon his senses, and he lived entirely in his head, in the assault of words and wordless cries counterpointed by the quiet but insistent instruction of his controller. Soon, the ranter’s vocal transmissions were accompanied by fierce emotions—hatred, fury, lust—so scalding that they seemed to peel away layers of Henry’s identity, as superheated steam might peel away skin. With the sounds and emotions came images of extreme violence that seemed beautiful to him and sexual congress so intense that, in its way, it was another kind of violence.
At one point, Henry Lorimar became aware of the sound of the idling car engine, the cold air blowing from the dashboard vents, and the stink of human waste. The last of those sensations turned his head to the left, where his partner, Nelson Luft, no longer writhed in agony.
White-faced and frail, Nelson slumped in his safety harness, head turned toward Henry, mouth agape, blood dripping from the cups of his ears. He had soiled himself. He was alive, softly inhaling and exhaling, his gaze moving slowly over the interior of the Lexus, as if everything on which his eyes alighted was mysterious to him. When he met Henry’s stare, Nelson appeared not to recognize his partner of fifteen years, regarding him with the same puzzlement inspired by the steering wheel, the radio, and the cup holders in the console.
Cold horror and grief iced Henry’s heart, and he began to surface from the thrall of the hateful rant. But the conscience that was not a conscience pressed him to put the Lexus in gear and get on with the search for the kidnapped boy, as he had agreed to do, as he had been instructed. Everything else meant nothing. Nelson Luft meant nothing. Nelson could be dealt with later. Nelson could wait. Nelson would be fine. Henry needed only to do what he had been told to do, what urgently needed to be done, and then he would be very happy, content, and at peace.
As horror and grief melted out of him, however, Henry didn’t release the emergency brake or put the car in gear. Like the sea to the moon, he succumbed to the tidal pull of the rant. The interior of the Lexus faded from his awareness as the exquisite images of violence and thrilling fornication flooded in upon him, accompanied by raw emotions and the tsunami of words that darkled his mind.
How much time passed, Henry could not say, but eventually the ranter stopped transmitting. Gradually, Henry became aware of the vehicle in which he sat, although at first he could not identify it or recall its purpose.
The whispering room was quiet, no communications incoming, but another strange sound in his head troubled him: sputtering-sizzling, subtle but persistent. When his eyes were closed, he could see—or perhaps he imagined—a darkness in his head across which the radials and spirals of a web pulsed irregularly with light, as if a current of varying power coursed through those filaments.
Degree by degree, knowledge and functionality returned to him. He sat up straighter. He adjusted his shirt collar. He remembered the remaining places he and Nelson needed to visit in their low-key search for the kidnapped boy, and he realized that he had better get on with the task.
In the passenger seat, Nelson Luft no longer breathed. His stare was as fixed as that of a mannequin. Blood had stopped seeping from his ears.
This was nothing to be concerned about. Nothing important. Nothing that mattered at all. Nelson could be dealt with later.
The important thing was to get on with the urgent hunt for the missing and endangered boy. It was misguided and selfish to think that anything mattered other than finding the boy.
The vehicle reeked of feces, but that was a mere inconvenience. Henry could get used to it. He was already getting used to it. Soon he wouldn’t smell it at all.
He released the emergency brake and put the Lexus in gear and drove back onto the highway. He could drive, but he wasn’t at ease behind the wheel like he’d been before. Everything seemed unfamiliar to him, almost as if he were a young teenager again, just learning to handle a motor vehicle.
Something had changed in him. He couldn’t focus on what he was doing as well as he once had. His mind kept drifting. Fear without cause came and went, as did sharp spasms of anger. Dramatic images of violence and brutal sex, none from Henry’s personal experience, quivered through his mind as vividly as if they were things that he had done.
He’d driven only a mile when a new voice rose in the whispering room, this one female. Simultaneously furious and frightened, ridden by hungers she could name and others for which she knew no words, she transmitted incoherent chains of words, hatred and desire, a threat and a challenge. Images, too. A blue stucco house with a white metal roof. Shaded by shabby palm trees. She wanted sex and blood, wanted to quell her fear by instilling terror in others, wanted the thrill of exercising her power and inflicting pain, wanted to scream into the void that she sensed yawning beneath her and, by sheer ferocity, prevent it from enfolding her into oblivion.
She was like a siren on night reefs, singing ships to their wreckage, and her enticing song appealed to some part of Henry that he didn’t understand, to a secret second heart that beat a tempo different from his first and that held within its throbbing chambers a blackness darker than death.
He knew the blue stucco house with the white metal roof. And even in his current condition, he knew how to get there.
For now, he had forgotten the boy, and the conscience that wasn’t a conscience could no longer control him.
The female voice was irresistibly alluring, calling to some self-destructive aspect of Henry Lorimar, but it was also savage and so venomous that he might need a weapon. He pulled the car off the road long enough to get a combination long-handled lug wrench/pry bar from the SUV’s tool kit.
3
TWO DIRT RUTS, stubbled with dead weeds, led past the abandoned blue stucco house and the ragged queen palms, past the yard of pea gravel and specimen cacti. Luther drove around behind the place and parked beside the attached one-car garage, which shielded the Chevy Suburban from the sight of anyone passing on the county highway.
“Come civilian, leave official,” Luther said. “Still the plan?”
“I don’t see any reason to change it. It’s been smooth so far, but maybe not much longer. You know what to do.”
“I know what to do,” he agreed. “Go to your boy.”
She walked along the weedy driveway for about seventy or eighty yards, to a turnaround in front of the dilapidated barn, which she knew was not only what it appeared to be.
The hot desert air vibrated with the sawing of insects that busied their bowstring legs, cars buzzing past on the distant county road, and an airplane whisking the day with turboprop blades. An aircraft had droned past when they were unhitching the Suburban from the motor home. Maybe this was the same one, seeking to seine her voice and location from the sky when she used a burner phone.
She stood before the weathered man-size door with its worm-eaten sun-split boards and rusted hinges, looking up where Gavin Washington had told her a concealed camera would be focused on her.
Hidden motion detectors had alerted Cornell Jasperson to her presence. The electronic lock opened with a buzz and a clunk.
Jane stepped into a white-walled vestibule where a camera surmounted a metal door. The door behind her closed automatically, and the one before her opened.
Lamplit in jewel tones, shadowy in places, lined with thousands of colorful spines, before her lay the fabled library for the end of the world, as magical as Gavin had described it.
At some distance stood Cornell: almost seven feet tall, knob-jointed like a mechanical construct, misshapen, a figure of fright on a dark street, but with the face of an angel, awkward and clearly shy.