CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bleak had to burst the lock on the door of Room 32.
He walked in, finding the air stale, and the room looking almost barren, with no furniture, no windows; yet complex with the geometry of magical symbols on every wall. And two people waiting in it. Loraine was sitting in a corner next to a dozing middle-aged man in glasses, suit and tie. The tie was painted with flowers.
She sat up, beaming when Bleak came in—then remembered to seem less glad to see him. “You finally made it,” she said, standing.
“What made you so sure I was coming?”
“I...” She raised her eyebrows. She blinked. “Urn—I'm not sure. But I knew.”
“Who's he?”
She looked at the man slumped in the corner. “Dr. Helman. Head honcho here—under Forsythe. Seems to be in some kind of trance.” She turned to Bleak. “Gabriel—we need to get away from here fast. I thought I heard shooting, but—”
“You're right about Helman, but wrong about leaving,” Sean said, coming into the room and closing the door behind him.
Bleak spun toward his brother, Sean, thinking he should simply tackle him and try to knock him cold, before he could do any magic. Or he could set the floor on fire around him, with a couple of energy bullets, to hold him off—and maybe get Loraine out of here. Or...
Or nothing. He couldn't do anything. Not yet. Bleak just stared at him. This is my brother. Sean Bleak. In person. Not an astral projection. This was his brother in the flesh, after being gone all those years.
Embraces were out of the question. Everything about Sean, that sickly grimace of a smile, the hunched shoulders, the burning eyes...
Everything said that Sean would not permit himself to be touched by his brother. He stood, motionless, near the closed door, emanating raw hatred.
I should make a move, Bleak thought. But he felt paralyzed. Straitjacketed by emotion. That's my brother.
Slowly, Sean turned his head to take in Helman. “I planted a little something in his pocket, earlier. Used it to send him a trancing spell. Helman did surprisingly well at resisting. Babbling on and on for quite a while. I always despised him. But he's a rag doll now. Never was anything but a silly little pawn.” Sean ducked his head to look balefully at Bleak. “It's no accident you're here, Gabriel— you know that, don't you? You were supposed to be here a little earlier...you got rerouted. Apparently we should have swept for ghosts when we got rid of that Scribbler of yours. But you're here now....
And you will help me. You will work with me. Our two opposing forces will open the doorway and Moloch will be here—and the Great Wrath will do as I command.”
“That's not what Helman thought,” Loraine put in. “He says your Outsider will do as it pleases, once it's fully here. It's just using you.”
Sean chuckled. An unpleasant sound. “You'll see. The plan is great, and grand. Forsythe appreciates me. He's been there for me—not like our old man, Gabe. He's made me part of the big design.”
“I can't help you, Sean,” Bleak said, his voice hoarse. “Not that way. I can help you by taking you away from here. We can get you therapy. You've been traumatized by what happened to you.”
“ Everyone's been traumatized!” Sean snapped, taking a furious step toward them, arms rigid at his sides. “Everyone! They look around at the world and they go, 'Oh my God, it's full of cruelty and parasites and disappointment and abandonment and sickness...and then you die!' Everyone breaks, inside, when they realize that!”
“You know there's more to it than that,” Bleak said.
He had to do something to stop this. But that was little Sean—grown big...
“What 'more to it'—our glorious life after death?” Sean jeered. “But first—you have to die! You choke to death from lack of oxygen...your heart stops! Cancer, emphysema, a stab with a knife! Dying hurts...and it seems to take an eternity, Gabe. And then! Then you get that glorious afterlife...to be a confused ghost, walking in circles! Or if you leave this world, most of you fades away, and what's left reincarnates! Back to the same dreary old grind! Life after death isn't much consolation, Gabriel. Best you can hope for is to be the slave of some angel somewhere!” Sean snorted with contempt.
Bleak shook his head. “There are other ways to see life. And death. You've been surrounded by some pretty twisted people, Sean. You don't get the chance to meet the other kind. Not everyone is damaged—not everyone has given up. A friend of mine survived the Nazi death camps—survived it in every way, Sean. It's possible to heal.”
Sean snorted. “I don't want to heal! I like what I am! Now you think about this. Not only are you not in this room by accident...but neither is she.” He pointed his left hand at Loraine. “Something's right there, in the room beside you, girl—invisible. Waiting for me to give it more life.”
And from the tips of his fingers issued a stream of blue energy, infused with crackles of red. Bleak started to summon up energies to block it—but it had already infused the shape of the invisible being that had been waiting in the room all this time. The outline of something big, and sinuous—a familiar, one of Sean's “especialities.” Its glossy brown-black insect head was the first part to visually materialize, spitting and hissing close to Loraine, making her gasp and flatten back against the wall.
In a heartbeat, four more yards of the familiar filled in, from the head down along its twisting, its interior parts first, then its armor-plated body—thick as a giant anaconda—with thousands of little sticklike, clawed arms threateningly waving. The familiar was a giant centipede—its faceted eyes, big as silver dollars, glittering with malevolent intelligence.
The supple creature was already whipping twice around Loraine, squeezing her like a python. The sharp hooks of its glossy brown-black mandibles snapped at her neck, its clawed legs clutched at her clothing, yanked at her hair. Its coiled body compressed her right arm crushingly to her ribs; her left arm was free, and she tried to tug the jointed coils from her, looking desperately at Bleak, eyes wide.
Bleak started instinctively toward her—and the giant, demonic centipede admonished him by tightening its grip on her, making her squeal with pain. It snapped at her hair—snipping away a piece of it, chewing it meditatively in its mandibles.
Bleak got the message. He stepped back. “I...Loraine...just...”
Sean chuckled. “Just what? Oh, don't look so anxious, Gabey! If you don't try that again, it won't hurt her! If you don't try to jump me and you do what I tell you—why, you'll get your Gothy little hottie back alive and only a little bruised! Just do the working, complete the summoning with me”— Sean's voice dropped a guttural octave as he finished the sentence— “and she will not have her eyes chewed out. “ Sean glanced musingly at Loraine, squirming in the familiar's tightening grasp. “It'll go
for the eyes first...then the brain. But—not as long as you behave yourself, Gabriel. Look—it's holding off!”
The centipede familiar snapped its mandibles near her eyes, making her draw her head back an inch, all the room she had. She bit her lip to keep from screaming. The creature had a strong grip on her—but didn't increase it. And it turned to look at Bleak, spitting and clicking, as if to await his decision.
Bleak felt waves of sick loathing and fury—loathing for what Sean had become, fury at himself for walking into this, for not getting Loraine out of here sooner.
He should never have taken that cup from Shoella. He should have been looking for this woman. For U.S. Central Containment Authority agent...Loraine Sarikosca.
His senses keening now, he could sense her connection to him—feel in the deep core of his being that she was The Other. He'd been trusted with the jewel of all rarities. The possibility of perfect love. And he'd let this happen to her.
“The familiar responds to my thoughts, Gabriel,” Sean said, taking up a place in the center of one of two interlocked silver pentagrams etched on the floor. “So if you try to interfere with it—or me— I'll make it kill her—bang!” Sean snapped his fingers. “Just like that! In a split second! You really have no choice in this. This is your soul mate, Bro! Something ordained by the universe itself. And it says you are driven to take care of her, no matter what. You can't let her die. Emotionally”—he spread his hands and tilted his head, his squiggling smile almost comic—”you're incapable of it! We're counting on that. So—shall we start?”
“Gabriel...” Loraine's voice was almost inaudible. “I have to die sometime. It's something I can bear. Don't.”
“What exactly do you want me to do, Sean?” Bleak asked. Desperately thinking that he could do the ritual—and somehow reverse it later. Send the thing they were to summon back.
But deep down, he doubted it. He'd need Sean's help, to send the thing back—and Sean would never give it.
Sean made a sniggering sound of triumph. “Excellencio! Now, Gabriel...move to the center of that pentagram opposite me.”
Bleak moved to the point opposite—and heard a slithery thump. He looked at Loraine, saw she'd shifted, pitching on her right side, taking the twisting coils of the serpentine insect with her, so that it snapped at her in anger, cutting her cheek slightly with its mandible. She was lying close by the still-tranced Dr. Helman.
“Don't make it angry,” Sean warned her. “I control the familiar—but it has a certain amount of autonomy. It might just choose to take a bite out of you.”
The centipede's mandibles snapped at her face; she squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head. “Gabriel...”
“Hang on,” he told her, inwardly calling for guidance. But he was a forest fire of emotion, inside —the roaring of the flames made any contact with the Spirit of Light impossible.
“It's easy,” Sean said. “Just pay attention, Gabriel. We're going to reach out, into the field of the Hidden. It's so powerful around us now! It's bristling with energy because you and I are close by...and because your li'l love, there, is handy. It's all part of the equation! Now reach out, Gabe, form your field of control, I'll form mine, and we'll push the two against one another, so they contact, but don't try to push me back—just hold it there. I will call out certain names. You call them in turn, after me— make them ring out strong in your mind! You know the drill! And combined with our power, they'll open the doorway—and the Great Wrath will come through!”
“The artifact will stop it,” Loraine rasped.
“You are so sadly uninformed, Little Miss Loraine,” Sean jeered. “It's weak enough now to let Moloch in—if I have my brother here to help me. When Moloch is here to serve me and Forsythe, we'll empower the wall again—fully! But some of us will be protected from it...through Moloch!
CCA agents will be protected from the artifact's suppression.... Something you don't know about, Gabe, Mr. Grand Wisdom! You don't know about that device! We will control it, so that some are able to project magic and no one else will! And Moloch will be our magical powerhouse. Our great ally! He is a being of a different order, and once he's here, its energies will not slow him down! Forsythe and I will control him...and through him, the country!”
“No!” Loraine said, her voice barely audible. The words choked out as she went on. “Forsythe is Moloch now. Forsythe is not your friend, he's a—”
“Shut up, you lying bitch!” Sean snarled, turning to her. And the centipede familiar tightened its grip so that she wheezed for air.
“Ease up on her, Sean—or she'll die!” Bleak warned him. “You won't have any hold on me if she dies!”
“Then tell her to shut up!”
But Sean eased the thing's grip and she breathed again.
“Sean—you're saying that CCA has a way to limit magic to American agents?”
“Through Moloch...it can limit the power to American agents—to us! ShadowComm will be done...all over the world the magic will belong to only a precious few of us!” Sean gestured grandiloquently. “To Breslin himself, in time! Moloch can give him the power too!”
So Moloch wanted to take control of the president.
“But, Sean...listen—”
“And then,” Sean went on, eyes bright, “we take over the Pentagon—no more resistance there. They will have to do just as we say.... And it begins today! Moloch has promised that the real power will come when we open the way for him.”
“It'll come through and it'll make you its slave!” Bleak told him despairingly. “Don't be stupid! You're the sucker here, Sean!”
“No—Forsythe told me! If I let it through, I command it!”
“That's a lie! Loraine's right—who do you think speaks through Forsythe? It's lying to you! The predators of the Wilderness have always lied, Sean!”
“They can't lie to me if I control them...and that is what I am going to do today. You are part of this ritual...but it is I who am the High Magician here. It is so ordained! Now...reach out...or we see what happens when we squeeze your destiny woman long and hard enough.”
Sean caused the giant centipede to tighten its grip just enough to make Loraine cry out in pain.
“All right!” Bleak shouted. “Ease up on her!” He took a deep breath, the air shivering in and out of him. He had never felt this much fear before. Except...in childhood. “Just—let me concentrate!” He closed his eyes. Felt the shape of the field around him, the shape of his own participation in the energy of the Hidden. A man's personal energy field was shaped like a brain, big enough to contain his whole ass body. As if he were standing within a transparent brain. And Sean had created an identical but opposite field, facing him, pressing against his field, as if they were forebrain to forebrain, the fields sparkling, crackling at their points of contact.
Bleak caught flashes of Sean's thoughts. Bits of memory. The two of them as small children, chasing a chicken across a yard, laughing. Kicking through piles of dead leaves.
Men looming over Sean, as he lay in bed, pressing something to his face.
Rooms. Locked rooms within locked rooms. Tests...A gigantic ache of loneliness like a barren plain shrieking with a cold wind.
Then Sean was intoning names. Bleak made himself begin to intone the names along with Sean.
Oh, God. Help me. God forgive me. What am I doing?
But as Sean Bleak intoned each name of power, Gabriel Bleak repeated it...
“Asmodeus...Moloch!”
“Asmodeus...Moloch!”
“Tetragrammaton...Moloch!”
“Tetragrammaton…Moloch!”
On and on, name after name, till they came to the point where Sean began his sole invocation, his arms lifted, his hands shimmering with dark energy...and between his hands a window opened, into the Farther Hidden, the After the After, the place beyond beyonds, and something was approaching from that beyond-the-beyond: a vast creature that emanated hunger, a creature that looked like living wheels within living wheels, each wheel serrated with inward-turning teeth, and an eye on a stalk in the centermost of the wheels, the stalk stretching out toward them.
Moloch was coming. To change the world.
Sean opened his mouth to cry out the final invocation.
“I'm sorry, Gabriel!” Loraine yelled.
There was a gunshot...loud in the barren room. Gun smoke wisped.
The window into the Wilderness fizzed with a confusion of energies—and seemed to swallow itself. It vanished. Moloch was gone—back to the spiritual wilderness.
Sean was standing there, staring at Bleak—then blood began trickling from his mouth.
Bleak suddenly remembered Sean just before they'd taken him...at the Dairy Queen, with chocolate syrup, from a dipped ice cream, streaming from his little mouth, just like that blood.
Sean went to his knees and lifted his hands palms upward—his empty hands.
He stared at his empty hands.
Then he slumped over. So that Bleak could see the small, round bullet hole in the side of Sean's head.
His brother, Sean, was dead. Really dead this time.
Bleak turned and looked at Loraine—and saw the centipede draining away...the energy draining out of its form as it had come. In two heartbeats, it was gone.
Loraine lay there on her side, weeping, Helman's .25 pistol held loosely in her limp, outflung hand. “I'm sorry, Gabriel...Had to do something.” She lay close beside the moaning figure of Dr.
Helman, who had clasped his knees against himself, was rocking in place. “Oh, no no no no...,” he moaned.
“Helman had a gun in his coat,” Bleak said, thinking it through, out loud. Barely able to think at all. “You took Helman's gun...and you...”
“I killed your brother,” she sobbed. “You can't love me. I killed your brother and you can't love me now.”
***
STANDING BESIDE GENERAL SWANSON, in the facility's security center.
Bleak watched the surveillance footage showing General Forsythe hurrying out of the building, submachine gun in hand, calling out to Gulcher, who was staring at the electric fence, at the back gate, trying to figure out how to get over it.
“The sentries were running around inside, like chickens with their heads cut off,” Swanson said, “looking for whoever shot their boys.”
On the monitor, Forsythe walked to the gate, took something from his pocket, pressed a button, and the gate rolled back.
Gulcher stared at Forsythe. Didn't look glad to see him. But after a moment, his shoulders slumping with resignation, he walked off beside Forsythe.
“That was just, what, half hour ago,” Swanson said wearily, rubbing his eyes. “I have some men out looking for them, but Forsythe kept a car at a lot down the road, and there's an airfield five minutes from here. And General Forsythe had a private jet out there. A CIA loaner—Gulfstream IX—kind of thing they used for rendition.” He grimaced. “Lord, those three young men—I left them with that lunatic.”
Bleak guessed Swanson was blaming himself for the deaths of the black berets. A feeling he understood.
“How is General Erlich, sir?” Bleak asked.
“They've got him breathing, his color's coming back. I still can't wrap my head around it—that it was me who.
“It wasn't you, General. Not really.”
“Big mess here. Men dead, and Helman—in some kind of coma. Stuck in it, seems like.” Swanson chewed his lower lip, glancing at Bleak. “You been briefed on the artifact in the north?” “Not exactly.”
“I'm going to take a chance. I need somebody to help me contain this thing. I don't trust anyone in CCA and no one else has the background. Or the talents.” Swanson shrugged. “It's not procedure. But you told me what you found out. And this is an emergency. I'm going to make a judgment call and tell you some things.... You were puzzling about the artifact...”
It only took five minutes to tell. About Isaac Newton, the Lodge of Ten. The wall of force.
Bleak felt shaken to the core, realizing how much of his life had been affected by the artifact.
He looked closely at General Swanson. “And you need someone from ShadowComm—someone with the right abilities—to fight a rogue from CCA. Sir, that's—”
“Yeah, I know. It's ironic. You going to work with us or not?”
“On this...I will. On one condition. There are people contained in this building—imprisoned. Maybe in other CCA facilities. I want them all released. You have the authority to do it. And I think you're a man of your word. Otherwise”—Bleak shook his head—“I can't trust CCA enough to work with it.”
“You know if Forsythe destroys that thing out there...if he opens the doors completely... if he messes with the artifact...”
“Oh, it might make the world pretty damned different. Could be it'd help people like me, more than hurt us. But I'll work with you....”
Swanson grunted. “Guess I can't order you, you're not army anymore. All right. I was probably going to do it anyway. Any containees we have in any facility will be released, on my order, immediately. We'll transport them wherever they want to go. I've already ordered some women who were used in an experiment to be transported to their countries of origin. We'll pay them off, maybe they'll get over it. May as well go the whole route. Shut this thing down and—”
Swanson broke off. Bleak suspected the general was going to say, And start from scratch. He probably had a plan for a different kind of control agency. Something he didn't want to tell Bleak about.
They'd deal with that later. Right now... “General?” They turned to see Loraine in the doorway, looking a bit rumpled but more in command of herself. “I just checked...Forsythe's already heading north in the Gulfstream.” “What's he plan?” Swanson asked. She shook her head. “I don't know for sure.”
***
FOURTEEN MINUTES LATER.
My brother is dead. I failed to help him...I should have saved him...
They were in a Humvee, Loraine and Bleak, riding to the airfield, with special papers from Swanson, driven by the same driver who'd brought Loraine to Facility 23, when Bleak realized that someone was sitting in the empty seat between him and Loraine. A ghost. He'd half expected Sean— but he felt immediately that it was someone quite different.
“Cronin?” he said, turning to look closely. The implications dawning on him.
The old man was sitting placidly beside him, slightly out of alignment with the seat. As if he were moving along on a different plane of relationship to the ground, not actually carried by the Humvee.
“Yes, Gabriel.”
“You're...you've passed on?”
The driver was staring at Bleak in the rearview. “Uh—someone want to tell me who he's talking to?”
“Don't worry about it,” Loraine said. “Just do your job.”
“Yes,” Cronin said. “I've moved on. A simple heart attack—ach, not so simple, I was in hospital, it took several hours. Two heart attacks really, to do it, ja? Did you ever read that Mr. C. S. Lewis? I read him in German but I think it's much the same. The author says that when you die, that's like having a tooth pulled, it seems to go on and on and it's awful but...at last the tooth is out, and you feel much better. That is not bad, such a description.”
He sat in profile, staring ahead, as if looking up the road, not looking at Bleak. But Bleak felt Cronin looking at him, somehow, anyway.
“Cronin...you can see Isaac now.”
Cronin sighed. “Not long ago, he moved on. I see he is well, in the high afterworld. Not so easy to see him yet. But...I see you—my other son.”
Bleak's heart seemed to clench in his chest, like wringing hands. “I'm going to miss you.”
“Maybe I stay in touch. And don't worry for your dog, after the first heart attack, I thought maybe I don't die today, but maybe I'm there for a while. I called your friend Donner, on that cell phone you %° gave me—he has Mr. Muddy now.”
“Thanks.”
“I heard you calling out, in such pain, a little while ago. So I look for you, I follow the traces, I come. You seem not so bad. But you are going to something...what it is, you don't know.” “That's right. Do you?”
“I have spoken to some who died here. A man, his name was Krasnoff. He says this thing that controls your running general, this Forsythe—it will destroy the thing in the north. I don't know what this thing is, but he says maybe you know. He says a deep darkness will come for the world then, when
the Great Wrath comes through. This is not what it wanted, but it is another way. So it destroys this thing—and it comes. You understand this?” “I think so. Cronin—”
“I cannot remain. This is a big effort, already. If I could get a headache, I would have one. But listen—you need anything else? Something more from me? Something to help?” “There is one thing you could do...” They spoke for another minute, then Cronin nodded... And was gone.
***
GULCHER FELT AS IF he'd been swallowed by this Gulfstream jet, flying north, north, and more north. It was comfortable in here, he even had a drink in his hand; it was pretty quiet, what with the new engines, but he felt like he was that Jonah in the whale. No deal with God to get out. Just waiting to be digested.
General Forsythe sat across from him on the aisle, sitting up with his eyes closed. Twitching every so often, as he communed with...something. Gulcher could see a lot of movement under the general's eyelids, like the guy was in heavy REM sleep. A little saliva dribbled from the corner of Forsythe's mouth.
A pilot in civvies was in the cockpit, radio switched off—no radio contact was probably against Canadian aircraft regulations. And that was it, the pilot and Gulcher and Forsythe, no one else in the private jet. Unless you counted the thing that had taken Forsythe over. But then, it wasn't exactly here.
Gulcher finished his bourbon—cadged from the minibar in the back of the plane—and thought about trying to slip back and get another, while Forsythe was sitting there with his eyes shut. But he'd been told “only one” and—
“You are right as rain to hesitate, there, Gulcher,” Forsythe said suddenly, his eyes still shut. “I told you one thing—you don't want to do another.”
So the general—or the thing that controlled him—was monitoring Gulcher as well as everything else. No privacy left. Nothing.
Should have gotten away faster, Gulcher thought. Had a chance...he caught we at the gate—
“You had no chance to get away from me,” Forsythe said, turning his head toward Gulcher.
But his eyes stayed shut. The eyeballs wheeling jerkily about under those lids. The face with the closed eyes was turned toward Gulcher as if Forsythe were blind.
“I am operating under limitations, until I can come fully into this world,” Forsythe said.
There was a resonation with those words, in Gulcher's mind...like Moloch's voice. The voice that had come to his mind that day he'd broken out of one prison and into this one—a prison he hadn't known he was in, until lately.
“But those limitations,” Forsythe went on, “don't apply to you and me anymore. I have no need, here, of the one who whispered to you. I am more closely connected to you, now, Troy Gulcher— we've grown together, you and I, over the course of time!”
Gulcher noticed how “Forsythe's” whole way of talking was different, now, when they talked alone, most of the time. Dropping the General Forsythe pretense.
“You are still useful to me,” Forsythe went on. “You're designed to control certain entities with great precision and reach. More reach than you realize.”
Has to be a way to get free.
“There is no way free of me this side of death, Troy,” said Forsythe, in a strangely companionable tone. “Now...” He paused, tilted his head. Eyes still shut, moving under the lids. Looking at what? “We're going to land at a strip not far from our ultimate goal. And we're going to shift over to a helicopter that will take us to the compound. On arrival at the base, soldiers will approach the helicopter with the intention of arresting or killing us. Calls have been made, you see. But you will deal with them. And then, another craft will arrive...and as for that...”
Forsythe's eyes abruptly snapped open.
His eyes had had become the color of phlegm and blood.
“And as for that,” Forsythe went on, perhaps aloud and perhaps not, “consider that it is better to give than to receive, as someone once said.”
***
A LONG TRIP, FAR to the north.
Loraine sitting next to Bleak, who was by the window in the rattling, echoey military transport plane, provided now by General Swanson. Bleak could feel the atmospheric cold, seeping through the window glass.
Sometimes they talked, almost whispering. Mostly Loraine, telling him everything she knew about Forsythe, CCA...and Gulcher.
The rest of the time Bleak sat staring out the window, down at rugged brown land, flecked with green, studded with gray-black outcroppings, passing far below with illusory slowness. A few twisty roads, the goggle shape of a lake, the occasional snowy peak.
Pushing farther, farther to the north.
The wall in the north, Bleak thought. At last.
“Bleak,” she said huskily, as they flew over the Hudson Strait, “I'm sorry I had to shoot him. I just—”
“You know, Agent Sarikosca—it wasn't overyet, with Sean...when you did it.” He wasn't sure if it was true, but he had to say it. “I might've found some way to stop him. To stop what was going on. I might have saved him.”
She nodded. Her eyes filling. “I know. But I couldn't take a chance. He had to be stopped right then and there...to be sure. It wasn't just about us.”
“I see that, but...” Bleak shook his head. He knew she'd had a reason. A good reason. But there had been a chance he could have saved Sean—and stopped Moloch.
Or perhaps not. He'd never know, now.
The plane pressed on. A stop at a small base, so they could shift to a helicopter. There was no place for a plane to land at the compound.
Almost running, heads down against the wind, across an expanse of tarmac to the new Greenhawk copter. Another takeoff.
It all seemed to take forever. Her eyes were red, as she rode beside him, both of them with their backs to the vibrating inner hull of the helicopter. But she was calm now. Looking miserably resigned.
Bleak knew he should reassure her: It's not your fault. It had to be done.
But his usual inward command of himself seemed crippled, when he thought about Sean. He felt barely able to speak.
He had been in the same room with his brother, at last. Then...
She had shot him in the head. He saw it replayed, over and over in his mind.
But they flew on, all the time knowing that General Forsythe was ahead of them—had a jump on them, on a private jet—a CIA Gulfstream, then a DIA chopper. The general and Gulcher. How was Forsythe going to use Gulcher?
But Bleak knew. He'd use him as a weapon.
Attempts at calling ahead for Forsythe's arrest had come too late—despite Swanson's urgent request, the Canadian government refused to shoot down the general's jet. It was a hard request to explain.
And by the time they could give the Canadians enough explanation to get more troops, more protection, to the artifact, it would be too late.
Could be just as well. Those troops might well simply die out there, anyway, if Bleak didn't intervene first.
The chopper ran full bore against a headwind, risking a crash on orders from Swanson. The engines roaring in their ears.
How many hours had passed, in just getting here? How far ahead were Forsythe and Gulcher?
***
IT SEEMED TWILIGHT WHEN Bleak and Loraine's helicopter arrived in the airspace near the compound around the artifact, but this time of year it might seem like twilight in the arctic circle for hours on end.
From the air, at about three hundred feet, they could see another, smaller helicopter, the one General Forsythe had used to get here from the airfield, standing near the Quonset huts.
And they saw the bodies of dead soldiers, scattered in front of the main building.
The air force pilot of their chopper, Purvis, was a short but broad-shouldered man in AF flight coveralls, lieutenant's bars. He was one of Swanson's aides—a volunteer and the only man who'd come with them. Bleak had turned down the offer of a marines escort. He didn't see any point in anyone else dying. Before it was necessary.
Purvis glanced back at them, made a sign that they were to land.
And then Purvis's eyes froze. That's what it looked like to Bleak—as if they turned to ice. The pilot pulled off his headset, unhooked his seat belt, and stood up...giving up control of the helicopter.
The chopper began to bob, shimmying, turning wildly in place...in a moment it would start spinning.
“Something's got control of him!” Bleak yelled, over the engine noise. He could see the entity, like a face formed in steam, simmering around the pilot's face, there and gone...sinking deeper into him. Firming up control.
“Gulcher!” Loraine blurted.
The pilot was lurching toward them, his face settling into sheer malevolence.
“I can't fly a helicopter!” Bleak told her, getting up, forming an energy bullet in his right hand.
“I had some emergency training but—”
The helicopter cabin tilted, Bleak staggered—grabbed at the port bulkhead with his left hand as it righted, almost at random. Managed to steady himself, but then the pilot was lunging at him. Bleak aware that Loraine was stumbling toward the cockpit of the helicopter.
Bleak flung the energy bullet, but the wobbling of the chopper threw him off and it only hit Purvis glancingly, searing through the fabric of his jumpsuit, burning into his left shoulder, making a shallow crater of burned uniform material and red-black flesh. Purvis snarled with pain but it didn't slow him down. He lunged, his powerful hands clamping onto Bleak's face and head, thumbs gouging at his eyes.
Bleak wrenched himself back, feeling those steely thumbs prying at the edge of his eye sockets— but then the chopper went into a sickening spin and both men were flung by inertia to the right, onto the deck of the helicopter's cabin. Purvis immediately pitched himself at Bleak, knocking him back onto the deck—and vising his hands on Bleak's throat.
The chopper was steadying, under Loraine's control...but that seemed to work in Purvis's favor, as he used his brawny chest, his weight, and the leverage of his feet against the deck to press down on Bleak with his upper body. His hands twisting Bleak's head on his neck.
He was trying to snap Gabriel Bleak's spine.
Bleak resisted with all the strength of his neck and shoulders. But the pressure was incessant and increasing, making white and blue spots flash across his vision. Slowly his head turned creakingly to the left...and if he stopped resisting, even for a split second, Purvis would break his neck.
Bleak smashed his fists at Purvis but the angle was wrong, he couldn't get any real punch force from beneath. And Purvis was a powerful man—Bleak tried to pry at Purvis's arms but felt no give from muscles about double his own.
His neck muscles were screaming with pain; the pressure was building. He heard a creaking sound in his head. Purvis was going to rupture his spine at the neck. He had no choice....
He slapped his hands onto the lower part of Purvis's head, either side of his jaws, pressed them there, drew energy from the Hidden, forced it up his arms, into both hands, and into Purvis's skull.
Purvis's head began to glow, at first the multicolor shimmer of an energy bullet, as Bleak pumped the power into his skull.
The sparkling spots over Bleak's vision were almost filling his sight. But still he drew the energy from the Hidden, trying to make Purvis recoil from the heat he pumped into him...hesitating to go all the way with that energy.
Yet Purvis's grip never eased. He was under Gulcher's control—would fight to the death. So the only way to stop him...
But Bleak had never gone this far with this kind of power. And this man was an innocent—just a puppet.
He seemed to see that teenage boy in Afghanistan again.
Thisman will die today, Gabriel. Cronin's voice. You cannot save him. Send him on, to us. We will care for him. It is not this man you fight against.
Bleak sobbed—and forced full power into his hands.
Purvis's head pulsed with the Hidden's concentrated incandescence, now glowing cherry red. He screamed—
And the pilot's eyes boiled out of his skull. He convulsed, back arching in agony...and let go of Bleak. Tipped over to the left.
Bleak struggled to sit up, gasping, straightening his aching neck...and saw, through the cockpit hatch, the ground rushing toward the windshield of the helicopter. They were coming in at a steep angle...they were going to crash!
“Loraine!” he shouted, trying to get up.
But then the chopper suddenly angled sharply up, and he slid back along the deck, trying to find something to brace against—and felt a crashing thump, then another, loud enough to make his head ring. Heard a prolonged metallic grinding.
The helicopter spun once across the ground.
And stopped, in a cloud of dust and oily smoke.
Bleak lay there a moment, rubbing his strained neck...then sat up, wincing, coughing in the foul air. Loraine loomed through the dust and smoke. Helped him to his feet, telling him apologetically, “I can't really fly one of these things except in the most, you know, theoretical way.”
“You got us down alive.”
“Oh, God...” As she saw Purvis. His face charred, eye sockets empty. “Did you have to?” “I had to. Come on.”
They climbed out of the helicopter—an awkward climb. The chopper was tilted all wrong, the slowing rotors barely clearing the ground on its port side.
They stepped away from the chopper, coughing in the plume of smoky dust, looked around. Men were sprawled in drying pools of blood. Some of them, even in death, still clutching assault rifles.
But one of those bodies lifted up, started crawling toward them. An unarmed young soldier, moaning softly.
Forsythe had used Gulcher to take out the compound's defenses. Probably turned half the soldiers on the other half. But he hadn't quite killed them all.
Loraine and Bleak went to the injured man, about forty feet from the chopper. The man lay on his belly, whimpering. Sensing the soldier wasn't under Gulcher's control, Bleak gently turned him on his back. Loraine knelt beside him.
A young marine. He had a bullet hole in his chest, right side.
“Everybody...” A bubble of blood appeared at his mouth. He was young, blue-eyed, and pale with blood loss. “They just...went crazy.”
“Take it easy, marine,” she told him, taking off her coat, folding it under the soldier's head for a pillow. “We know what happened. Just rest—help is coming. They're getting clearance. Be here in about half an hour. Medical team and everything.”
Bleak looked around for Forsythe—and didn't see him. But he could feel the background signal of the artifact—something he'd felt, most of his life, never entirely sure what it was. It was coming from the dig, down the hillside.
A cool wind blew a scent of sea, from Baffin Bay, not far off; mosquitoes buzzed. Somewhere overhead, a gull shrieked.
Bleak said, “Wait here, Loraine.”
“No,” she said flatly.
“You have to help this man. There'll be medical supplies in their admin building, there. Could be others alive.”
“Bleak...Gabriel...”
“Just... wait...here, “ he said, with all the conviction he could project.
She looked at him. Then she pointed. “It's that way.” She went to the admin building to search for bandages, medical supplies.
Feeling the breeze ruffle his hair, and reaching out to feel the environment on a much deeper level, Bleak strode toward the artifact—the quick stride becoming a jog, then flat-out running, as he reached the spiraling ramp and saw, at the bottom of the dig, two men close by the artifact.
One of them, Forsythe, was attaching something to a pagoda-shaped, green-gold metal artifact rising from the pit.
“Gulcher!” Bleak shouted. “He blows that thing up, you'll be up to your neck in competition!” He jumped from one ramp down to another, cutting through the curves of the spirals, heading directly toward the center, forcing his way through a labyrinth. Gulcher turned toward him, frowning. Forsythe was making an adjustment.
Bleak almost stumbled over the body of a white-coated middle-aged man. And immediately saw the man's ghost, appearing beside him, sitting on the rim of the ramp, looking confusedly at his body. Shot through with bullet holes.
“Come with me!” Bleak shouted at the ghost. “Join the others! The one who killed you is there!”
He ran past the ghost, calling out through the Hidden—and summoning its energies, to coalesce inside him, as he went. Until he was just a few strides from the two men and the artifact.
That's it, he thought. The artifact. That thing was a big part of the secret behind his life, behind who he was—dug up, exposed, but still cryptic, part of its origin still a mystery.
Then General Forsythe turned to face him—grinning. His hand on a switch, which was black-taped to a plastic explosive, wired to a side panel on the artifact.
“Close but no cigar,” Forsythe said. “It's all ready to go.”
Bleak was already concentrating the energy of the Hidden around the artifact—creating a cushion. Holding its few moving parts in place. Forsythe growled to himself as he attempted to press the button. Which wasn't working, as long as Bleak could keep the locking field in place.
But Bleak knew he couldn't stop him this way for long.
“Gulcher—,” Bleak said, taking a step closer, forming energy bullets in the palms of his hands. “That thing blows up, they'll swarm over the planet and that means you too!”
“Oh, a few eggs will be broken, but it'll be a fine omelet,” Forsythe said, reaching for something behind him. A gun he'd left lying on a segment of the artifact. “I had hoped to come in exclusively—
through you and your brother—but this way will work, in a pinch. Once the artifact is down, I'll be able to come through completely, way ahead of...what did you call it? Our competition. I may have to divvy up the world, but there's so much life to be sucked up here, I won't mind so much. And so...”
He swung the submachine gun toward Bleak—who threw the two energy bullets, left and right, striking the submachine gun.
Forsythe shouted in pain and dropped the weapon—then he realized that Bleak couldn't still be controlling the bomb and throwing energy bullets too, and he turned, lurching toward it...
And Gulcher stepped in, smacked Forsythe hard in the jaw, with his right fist.
Forsythe went over backward, falling in the dirt. He glared up at Gulcher. The voice that came out of Forsythe wasn't Forsythe's. It phased in and out of audibility, almost warbling. “You little... worm. That... will get you an... eternity in my jaws.”
“I'm sick of all you f*cking big shots,” Gulcher said. “I want to know if what he's saying is true. That a*sholes like you will be all over this planet.”
“All over it, yes, “ Forsythe said, staring at Gulcher... getting control of him again. “And scraping scum like you from our boots. “
Bleak focused, concentrated...and called, within himself, to his allies. The artifact's power was more concentrated here, but Bleak could still contact the Hidden.
Forsythe stepped over to Gulcher, put his hand on his head—and hissed, “Down!”
Gulcher went limp—and slumped to the ground, against the cowling of the artifact. He sprawled against it, making odd little sounds...
As Bleak concentrated, adjusting field strength, Forsythe went on, in his normal voice, reaching for the bomb, “Not only is it true, Gulcher, but this explosive is strong enough to take you right out of this life—and right into my jaws as I come into this world.”
But his finger stopped a quarter inch from the detonator.
He seemed paralyzed...as Bleak focused the Hidden's energies around Forsythe...from all sides. Pressing...
Then Forsythe, slowly and painfully, turned to face Bleak—and the thing inside Forsythe started pushing back. The field, in the conflict, became visible. The violet-blue shape of giant hands around Forsythe, closing in on him, to squeeze the intruder out—and the red-energy outline of Moloch, flickering in and out of visibility, showing itself, exerting all the strength it could send through the crack it used to penetrate the human world. Bleak felt it writhing in his field of control.
And he felt himself faltering. The thing was sickening to be in contact with. It was so profoundly nonhuman, its appetites so vast, so alien, he felt an ineffable repugnance that made him recoil in sheer existential horror. He grimaced—and went to his knees, struggling to keep the energy field in place, to increase the pressure. Trying to get help from the refined energies the Spirit of Light had opened to him. But still the defiant pressure grew.
“Now!” Bleak shouted. “Cronin—tell them! Do it now!”
And then they were there, those Bleak had summoned: the ghosts of the scientist who'd died in the dig pit, and the marines who'd died in the compound, and Krasnoff, and Scribbler, and the three sentries who'd died at Facility 23, and Cronin himself. They all appeared around Forsythe, standing in a ring facing him, their hands lifted, touching the field...adding their psychic strength to it. A circle of ghosts acting as an astral magnetic coil to increase Bleak's power.
The field compressed around General Forsythe; staticky and flaring with internal conflict, becoming darker, more intense, as it closed in around him...pressing the possessed man from all sides. It wouldn't crush his body. Refined, it would pass through the physicality of his body, like a net through water. And it was a tightening net, dragging psychically through the general.
Forsythe screamed as the energy net closed inescapably around him—squeezing, pressing.
Then there was a flash of blue-white light. And it was done.
They'd forced out the spiritual alien, the intruder—pushed it out of the man, into the open.
Bleak saw it for a moment, just the portion of it that had entered the world, hovering there, a rearing bulk of glossy green-black, largely taken up by a leechlike, circular, serrated mouth, with more serrated mouths inside it. Poised over Forsythe like a giant Venus flytrap...staring furiously at Bleak with its single polyp eye the color of bloody phlegm. It squealed, ear-piercingly, just once...
Then it contracted, shrinking from yards across to a pinpoint in a second...and snapped out of the world with a crisp crack! that echoed through the dig site.
General Forsythe fell flat on his face, in the dirt.
He lay in the grit, squirming, babbling to himself. “What did I do what did I do what did I do what did I do I can still feel it I can still feel it I can still feel it what did I do do do do do DOOOOOOOO...”
Bleak stepped over to the plastic explosive, pulled out the wires, dismantled it, as the ghosts moaned softly to one another and faded as if blown away on the rising wind. Cronin was the last to go. “Good-bye, wein Jungen...good-bye...”
“Thanks for coming back to this tired little world, Cronin,” Bleak said. Feeling a sudden stab of loneliness. “See you someday. Thanks for always being there, and...” But Cronin was gone.
Then Bleak stepped back and looked at the artifact. This thing limited his power. It had granted him, and ShadowComm, by accident or by someone's strange design, more power than their kind had in the past. It helped keep the predators of the Wilderness at bay—but even without that, would it be good to get rid of it? Or had Newton been right...that they weren't ready?
Gulcher lay there, against the artifact, muttering to himself.
Bleak figured he should kill Gulcher. But Troy Gulcher looked stricken; as shattered, as impotent, as Billy Blunt and Forsythe.
What about Sean? Where was he now?
Turning away from the artifact, the wind blowing dust in his eyes, heartsick, Bleak tried to tell himself that Sean might be wandering the world as a ghost...or reincarnated. But he knew different, deep down.
He knew that his brother was somewhere in the Wilderness. Sean. Keeping to the shadows of the Wilderness, trying to hide from its predators, and trying to remember why this had happened to him.
***
AN URBAN RIVERBANK, A warm, sticky night in New Jersey. Twenty-three hours later.
The decaying dock where Bleak had met with ShadowComm before.
They were all here now, more than Bleak had ever met. Every one of them watching Bleak closely as he walked up with Loraine Sarikosca at his side.
He and Loraine hadn't had much time to talk, since the events at the artifact. Since the artifact had been reburied and left to do its job as well as it might. They'd been too busy to talk. Supposedly. Coordinating with Swanson. But maybe they'd just avoided it.
Oliver was there, scowling beside Pigeon Lady—covered in blue-gray fluttering, some of the birds real, some familiars. And Giant was there, and the others—as well as some Bleak didn't know. A' young, plump, cocoa-colored woman in a Gypsy dress, but no Gypsy; a tall albino with long white hair and a black suit; a small blond girl with a python that wasn't really a python twined around her waist... and many others.
“We've been trying to find Shoella,” Oliver began.
“She's not in this world at all,” Bleak said. “But she hasn't died. She's in a pocket world of her own creation—trapped there. It's pretty bad. I think she's probably found a hiding place there. I'm hoping to find some way to get her out.”
“Oh, f*cking hell,” Oliver said. “She's trapped. And you had nothing to do with that?”
“No. That was her doing, man. Hers and...CCA.”
“CCA?” Oliver said. “I heard some stuff. About a predator named Moloch chewing through those a*sholes. And CCA let some people go. But Scribbler...”
“Scribbler didn't make it,” Bleak said. “But he's freer now than he's ever been.”
“Yeah? And you want us to help Shoella?” Giant asked, looking at Bleak with rank suspicion.
“With that—and with other things. Troy Gulcher is still out there. He disappeared from the hospital—and the familiars that were released by Moloch, those are still floating around the world for Gulcher to use. And there are others—lots of other black souls that Moloch empowered. They're hostile to us. They're a whole different species of shadow. They'll find us and kill us if they can— because they don't want anyone to have the power but them.”
“Maybe or maybe not,” Oliver said. “How do we know any of that's true?”
“You saw the one that summoned the fire imps,” Bleak pointed out. “You think he was alone? You think he'd stand with us?”
“Why should we trust you—and her?” Oliver nodded at Loraine. “She's an agent of CCA.”
“CCA no longer exists,” Loraine said. “But some of us were hoping to...to work with you. In some other way.”
“With Breslin in charge?”
They all laughed at that.
Loraine smiled. “I know. But he's been taken down a few pegs. There is some...testimony. Behind closed doors, in Congress. Not for public consumption but—he's being reined in. He'll be gone next election.”
“Believe that when I see it.”
“About believing,” Bleak said. “I want you to go ahead and look into my mind—Loraine's too, i￡°z she's willing. Send your familiars to look. See if you can trust me.”
The ShadowComm drew off, in a group, to confer. Bleak and Loraine waited. A tugboat hooted on the river; a siren moaned in the distance.
“Gabriel,” Loraine said, in an undertone. “We haven't had much time to talk.”
“We'll talk later, Loraine,” he said gently. “We have to think about what all of it means—if it's true about you and me. It's a big responsibility. It's so rare. But...maybe we can't do it this time around.” Meaning, in this life. “Maybe it'll have to be...”
Then Giant walked importantly up to them, the others following him. “Pigeon Lady will look.”
“Okay,” Bleak said.
Loraine hesitated. “Will this be like...when Forsythe...”
Bleak shook his head. “No. That thing was predatory. It's different. It's intrusive but—not like that. Not violent.”
“All right—then let's do it.”
Pigeon Lady walked up to them—as the others backed away. Then the pigeons covering her seemed to explode, outward, toward Bleak and Loraine...the ones that weren't real pigeons, the familiars, flew right at their faces, blocking their vision, covering everything, a flurry of wings and glittering pink eyes and gray-blue feathers that filled the world.
Bleak closed his eyes and felt them flying into him, and through him, as if his body were a man-shaped building, and the birds were flying through its open windows, seeking.
He smelled them, acrid; felt them, sharp-clawed.
It was over in twenty seconds. Another burst of flurrying—and they were gone. All that remained was a slight headache...and a faint nausea. “Oh,” Loraine said, swaying.
Bleak caught her in his arms to keep her from falling. “I wonder if she's faking that,” Giant said. “Shut up, Giant,” Oliver said.
“They're okay,” Pigeon Lady said. “We can trust them. Bleak is telling the truth. And with Shoella gone...we need someone who can call the shots.”
“I guess so,” said the albino. “Let's vote. But I think it should be him. He's the one that took down the CCA.”
“What the hell,” Giant said boomingly. “I'll vote for that. Until Shoella returns...let it be Gabriel Bleak.”
***
THE NEXT MORNING. SUNNY and bright, not yet hot. Bleak and Loraine were walking along a street in Harlem, with Bleak's dog, Muddy, running ahead of them. Loraine wore jeans, and a sleeveless, red T-shirt, red high-top sneakers.
Bleak wore a long, untucked white shirt, jeans, boots, with a vintage rock T-shirt under it: HAWKWIND. And over one shoulder he had slung a backpack.
It was a run-down street, its gutters cluttered with trash; buildings were boarded up on the left. But at brownstones farther down, people sat companionably on the steps. The closed-down school was still shuttered, across the street. Turfies milled on the sidewalk near the school fence, talking; people in hoodies, glancing suspiciously at Bleak and Loraine.
Pigeons fluttered suddenly, in front of them, and Loraine visibly shuddered. “Oh, God, I'm not quite over that. You made it sound like nothing. But...”
Bleak chuckled. He wanted to put a reassuring arm around her. He wasn't sure if it would be welcome. She seemed scared of their special status, together—and Sean's death hung between them, not quite resolved.
“Why'd you want to come back here?” Loraine asked. “Where you killed that speed dealer.”
“Thought he might still be here. He doesn't seem to be. I wanted to have a shot at telling him to move on. I don't feel right when I...” Bleak shrugged. “Never felt good about killing people. I was pretty good at it once—but never learned to like it. Even knowing there's life after death. 'Cause
you're ending something you don't have a real right to end. Zweig's death—that was his doing. But still...1 had a nightmare about that one, early this morning.”
She thought about it, then nodded. “What's in the backpack?”
“Ah. About that.” He put his hand in his left pants pocket and closed his fingers around the talisman—this one altered a bit from the design that Shoella had used. “I spent yesterday doing some research. Refining Shoella's technique. Talking to the Talking Light...1 can talk to it better now. Now we've made more contact. And it told me.”
She looked at him. “Told you what?”
“That you'd better take my hand now.”
She frowned—but she shrugged and took his right hand. They walked a few steps more. He called to the dog and it ran back to him, snuffling. “Stay real close, Muddy. Real close.”
The dog seemed to understand, following along pressed against Bleak's left leg as they walked a few steps more...
And the street transformed around them.
Up ahead, the Harlem street glimmered and shifted, warped, and was gone—replaced by a country landscape. There were trees that hadn't been there before. A stand of pines. And just this side of the pines a curving line of green rushes marked out a stream running by a cottage, half broken-down, overgrown on one side with wild roses...a grassy field beyond it...a hawk circling in the immaculate blue sky...
Loraine gasped. “What...where's Harlem?”
“Look behind you.”
They both turned—Harlem was back there, visible through a circle of watery light. A cab was pulling up, a skinny, pockmarked, overly made-up white woman getting out beside a broken fire hydrant. Gang tags decorated the streetlight posts. A skinny cat ran up the chipped steps of a brownstone. A plane traversed the thin, smoggy clouds just above the skyline.
“It's still there,” Bleak said. “You have only to turn around, walk back. Get that cab before it leaves. You don't have to go with me.”
She looked at him, squinting a little against the sun—the other sun. “And the backpack?”
“Stuff we might need. If we stay in that cottage. It's a pocket world—an idealized world outside of time, a paradise I created between the planes—a living world, all to itself. This one is based on some land near my parents' ranch in Oregon. I used to stay in that little cottage overnight. It needs fixing up. The fishing's good. I've got a sleeping bag.”
“Just one?”
“Just one. If you want to come with me.”
“We couldn'tjust stay there. We have things we have to do in...in this world.”
“Yes. But time passes differently there. We could spend a long time alone together. Finding out what it means, when people are meant for one another.”
“What! You've never even kissed me, you son of a bitch!” She laughed.
Bleak grinned, dropped the backpack, and kissed her. The dog barked, someone on the street hooted at them.
She broke the clinch and stepped back. “Let's not waste any more time here.” Bleak picked up his backpack. She took his hand.
And the three of them, Bleak, Loraine, and Muddy, turned...and vanished from the Harlem sidewalk.
About the Author
John Shirley is the author of many novels, including Demons, Crawlers, In Darkness Waiting, City Come A-Walkin', and Eclipse, as well as collections of stories, which include Really, Really, Really, Really, Weird Stories and the Bram Stoker Award-winning collection Black Butterflies. His newest novels are John Constantine: Hellblazer—War Lord; John Constantine: Hellblazer—Subterranean; and, for Cemetery Dance books, The Other End. Also a television and movie scripter, Shirley was coscreenwriter of The Crow. Most recently he has adapted Edgar Allan Poe's “Ligeia” for the screen. His authorized fan-created Web site is www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley and his official blog is www.JohnShirley.net.