******
New Hampton: Snake Hill
Jerry looked at his new found partner dubiously. “Ophiolatrists?” he asked. “What’s that?”
“Snake worshipers,” Angel said briefly, her face set a frown that seemed habitual. She was quite good-looking, Jerry thought, despite her dourness. Her leather jumpsuit accentuated the lushness of her figure and her gloomy expression couldn’t eclipse the strong, handsome lines of her features. She wasn’t really beautiful because she lacked any hint of delicacy, but she had other qualities in sufficient quantity to more than make up for that.
They walked down the road in silence for several minutes. It was pretty obvious to Jerry that if there was going to be any conversation, he’d have to initiate it. It was in his experience pretty much always a good idea to talk to attractive women, because all good things started with talking.
“So,” Jerry said, conversationally as they sauntered together down the country road, shaded by the thickly-forested slope that came down to the verge, “how long have you worked for the government, Angel?”
“My name’s not Angel,” she said.
Jerry frowned. “Sorry. I thought Ray said—”
“I am the Midnight Angel,” she informed him. “Named after the hour of my Lord’s Passion in the Garden of Getheseme.”
“I—see,” Jerry said, thinking, Why are all the great-looking ones such nuts?
“This must be it,” she said, her full lips grimacing in distaste as they halted in front of a gated dirt road that led up into the heart of Snake Hill.
Jerry peered over her shoulder to read the hand-lettered sign nailed to the wooden gate.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
POSTED
CHURCH OF THE SERPENT REDEEMED
NO TAX COLLECTORS, POLICE OFFICERS,
OR GOVERNMENT MEN
THIS MEANS YOU!!!!!
The periods at the tips of the exclamation points were represented by slightly off-centered bullet holes punched through the wooden sign. The free-hand letters were actually well formed and on the edge of artistic. The spelling was surprisingly literate.
“Well, none of that fits us,” Jerry said. “I mean, you may work for the government, but you’re not a man—”
She turned and stared at him.
“I mean obviously. Not. So... I guess we can go in.”
Angel turned without a word and slipped the small wire loop off the gate’s upright post. Jerry didn’t take her utter dismissal personally. It seemed the usual face that she presented to the world. She swung the gate open and Jerry started to follow her onto the winding dirt path leading up Snake Hill when, with a laboring engine smelling of burning oil, an ancient Volkswagen mini-van painted in faded psychedelic designs of exploding stars and dancing mushrooms—with a big peace sign on the front panel—pulled up to the turn-off and chugged to a stop, sounding something like a lawn-mower with a bad choke.
A young man stuck his head out the driver side window. “Can I help you folks?”
Jerry glanced at Angel. She was looking at the newcomer with recognition and active suspicion, but didn’t seem prepared to comment. He stepped towards the van, smiling, ready to take charge.
“Maybe,” he said. “We’re looking—whoa!”
Pungent waves bearing the scent of marijuana wafted out from the open window and hit Jerry in the face with the force of a palpable blow. Suddenly he felt as if he’d been transported into a Cheech and Chong movie. The guy in the VW could have easily been a bit player in Up In Smoke. He was young, maybe in his late twenties—though Jerry was well aware that the wild card virus had transformed the phrase “appearances can be deceiving” from a cliché to an ultimate truth—but his hair style, dress, and general deportment seemed four decades out of phase. Though he was Caucasian, his thick, wiry black hair was fluffed up in a bushy Afro. He had a Fu Manchu mustache and large, sharply delineated sideburns that appeared more often in gay fantasies than in real life. He wore what appeared to be a paisley tie as a cravat, and had tiny, octagonal-shaped granny glasses, tinted purple, on the tip of his long, straight nose. His purple silk shirt had long, puffy sleeves and was patterned in a startling green and crimson orchid print. His ragged jeans were embroidered with, from what Jerry could see, flowers, smiley faces, and peace signs. He seemed to take no notice of the fact that Jerry, a complete stranger, could obviously detect the odor of mary jane wafting off him in waves approaching tidal in size and effect.
“—Uh,” Jerry caught himself. “Are you a member of the Church?”
The living museum-piece shook his head. “No, man. But these righteous dudes are like customers of mine.”
“Customers?” Jerry asked with a raised eyebrow.
“That’s right. I’m like, their grocer, man. All organic. All natural. All the best.”
Jerry glanced at Angel, whose frown had deepened. Actually, Jerry thought, it would do her a world of good to get stoned. It’d loosen her up a little. And if she stays around this guy long enough, she’d get high just from the contact. He coughed discreetly. The fumes were already starting to get to him.
Angel stood beside Jerry and stared suspiciously at the newcomer. “Really?” she asked. “Exactly what do you sell?”
The hippie smiled, unfazed by her glowering frown. “Hey, I know you, man. I mean, I seen you before down at Kaleita’s store driving that bitchin’ Cadillac SUV, though, really, man, I don’t much approve of SUV’s because they’re really bad for Gaea and all her children—”
“Answer the question,” Angel said severely.
Beaming, he jumped out of the van. Jerry took one breath and had to turn his head away. He could feel his eyes starting to water.
“I’ll show you, man. Come around and take a look at our mother’s generous bounty.”
Jerry shrugged at Angel, and they followed him to the van’s side where he’d already slung open the door, and stood proudly, gesturing at the baskets within.
Jerry had to admit that everything looked good enough to eat, even the zucchini, but he suspected that he’d been standing a little too close for a little too long to the sixties poster child and was at least a little high from the fumes the guy emitted like some kind of tangible pheromone.
Angel just looked blankly at the baskets of red, vine-ripened tomatoes, the bundles of scallions and red onions, crates of lettuce, the cucumbers and zucchini, and open burlap bags of potatoes that still had clumps of thick, rich soil clinging to them.
“What’s your name?” Jerry asked him.
“They call me Mushroom Daddy,” the horticulturist said, “because I grow the most bitchin’ ‘shrooms in Orange County. Got a special greenhouse for them with all the glass painted black and dirt that’s—“
Jerry nodded, forestalling the horticultural lecture he was sure was about to come. “I’m Creighton,” he said. “This is Angel.”
“Woah,” Mushroom Daddy said. “Angel. Cool. Creighton. Groovy, man. What do you folks want with the snake handlers?”
“Ah, well,” Jerry said, “we’re looking for a kid. A kid who’s been lost in the woods overnight. We hoped they may have seen or heard something.”
“Heavy,” Daddy said. “Why don’t you hop in the ol’ van and I’ll give you a lift. Their commune is about a mile up the hill. They don’t take too good to strangers, but seeing as you’re with the Daddy, they might to help you. They know just about everything that goes on around Snake Hill.”
“Groovy,” Jerry said.
Mushroom Daddy slammed the side door shut and slung back into the driver’s seat.
Jerry smiled at Angel. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll close the gate.”
She went around to the passenger’s side and gingerly got into the van. Mushroom Daddy started it up again. With much tender encouragement and delicate manipulation of the gas pedal, the engine finally caught. Jerry closed the gate and climbed into the front seat after the van inched forward, exchanging smiles with Daddy over a stiff-featured Angel as they chugged up Snake Hill, a Canned Heat tape playing softly on the eight-track.
Jokertown: The Jokertown Clinic
Fortunato woke to darkness and pain. It was odd because he hurt so badly yet he couldn’t feel his body. He tried to lift his right arm and hold his hand in front of his eyes, but couldn’t manage it. He didn’t know if he was lying on a bed or perhaps the floor of the abandoned building, sitting in a chair or floating in a pool of water. Though he didn’t feel wet. All he felt was pain.
Then he thought of opening his eyes. He blinked at what he saw. It was himself. He was lying in a bed, and it didn’t look good. The white sheet hid most of his body, but it was clear that he’d been hurt very badly. His left arm, visible over the sheet, was bandaged from palm to biceps. A drip line ran up from his elbow to a bag of clear fluid hanging from a hook over his head. His nose was bandaged as if it’d been broken. His eyes were swollen nearly shut and horridly blackened. His entire face, in fact, was as bruised and battered as if he’d been in a fight, and lost.
Suddenly he remembered that he had. He remembered the confrontation with the Jokka Bruddas. They’d overwhelmed him almost immediately. He remembered getting a few good licks in, but it seemed pretty clear from his current state that he’d lost the fight. He looked awful.
Suddenly he wondered how he could see his entire body, head to toe, including his face, and the bed he was laying on. He wondered dully if he were dead. Killed, and maybe eaten by a bunch of under-age street punks. That would mark a glorious end to his career. The man Tachyon had once called the most powerful ace on Earth beaten to death by juvenile delinquents.
But he wasn’t dead. He certainly hadn’t been devoured. He was either asleep or unconscious, but he could see his chest rise and fall. The squiggles on the heart monitor over his bed seemed to be spiking in a nicely regular rhythm. He suddenly realized what was going on. He was projecting his astral form, hovering over what clearly was a hospital bed. Somehow his powers—or at least one of them—had come back to him, without the need for the Tantric magick that he’d once practiced to charge his batteries. Tachyon had told him that the rituals were simply a crutch for his conscious mind, but he’d never believed him.
Maybe the space wimp had been right all along.
He couldn’t tell for certain what had done it. Maybe the anger. The sheer impotence of being Fortunato and yet being unable to defend himself from some pissant street thugs, when once he’d defeated the Astronomer over the skies of New York. Maybe it had been the fear he’d felt when he’d realized that he could indeed be beaten to death by those children. Maybe it had been the realization that if that happened he couldn’t help his son.
He looked down at his body. He realized that although it might be dangerous, he had to stay out of it. His body wouldn’t last for long without his spirit to guide and animate it, but he had to take the chance that it would hang on at least for awhile. It was likely that the liberation of his astral form had been the work of his unconscious mind. If he returned to his body, there was no guarantee that he’d be able to leave it again. And his body wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. It looked too broken up.
His astral form was free to travel. To prove it to himself he floated out of his private hospital room and found himself in a familiar corridor. He realized that he was back in the Jokertown Clinic. He sped along the corridor, unseen and untouched by the nurses and patients he passed, though one joker perhaps blessed with a touch of second sight seemed to watch him as he floated by. But the joker said nothing and Fortunato slipped into another of the clinic’s private rooms, and found himself in Peregrine’s presence again.
She was sleeping. Josh McCoy was dozing in the chair by her bedside. Both looked tired and worn, Peregrine more so. Fortunato’s astral body hovered above her. He felt an overwhelming desire to hold her again, but he realized that he’d forfeited that right a long time ago. He reached out and touched her cheek, his incorporeal fingers slipping through skin and the flesh beneath.
He had to find his son, but he had nothing to go on. No clue as to where the boy might be. But Peregrine... she probably knew the latest news of his whereabouts.
He reached out with his mind, then hesitated. Suddenly he couldn’t bear the though of going into her consciousness and discovering her most intimate, most true thoughts. He looked at the sleeping figure of Josh McCoy. He wasn’t wild about this idea either. But he needed the information.
He entered McCoy’s mind. It was as easy as it had always been. He had lost nothing of his power. Nothing of his control. He touched lightly, looking only for information relevant to the search for his son. He didn’t want to pry deeply into McCoy’s private life, either.
Surprising, the first thing he discovered was about himself. About how he had sent out a psychic distress call when he’d been attacked by the Jokka Bruddas. How it’d taken Father Squid and his search team hours to discover his torn and battered body in the rubble of the abandoned building. How they’d found the dismembered corpses of the Bruddas among the wreckage of their headquarters.
Fortunato had no memory of killing them. It must have been his subconscious that had lashed out with the deadliness of a cornered lion turning on a pack of emboldened jackals, teaching them who was still king of beasts.
So be it, Fortunato thought. He took no pleasure in the killing, but neither did it bother him. He killed to live. That was the way.
He delved further into McCoy’s sleeping mind, seeking out information of his son.
The first that came up was his image. It startled him. The boy didn’t look exactly like him, but the resemblance was there, in the eyes, around the mouth. It was startling to see, and breathtaking in an odd, somehow exhilarating way. It was a bit of himself. There was no denying it. He stored the image in his own mind, and went on, finally uncovering McCoy’s memory of a phone call they’d gotten from a detective agency whose job it was to protect the boy.
He was safe, for now, at a camp in upstate New York at a place called New Hampton. His bodyguard was with him. They were sending along reinforcements just in case of another attempt to kidnap him.
He slipped out of McCoy’s mind and looked down at the sleeping Peregrine. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll find him. I’ll protect him. I promise.”
She stirred and sighed. He wondered if somehow she’d heard his unhearable words.
He suddenly felt younger than he’d felt for years. He felt as if the world about him was conquerable again. Like a wraith he rose in the air, through the room’s ceiling, up a floor and through Finn’s office where the young doctor was laying on his specially-constructed bed in a corner of the room, trying to snatch a few hours of rest, and then finally up through the clinic’s roof and into the open sky above.
The sun was still in the morning quarter. From the movement of nearby tree branches he could tell that it was fairly windy, but his astral form could not feel the wind itself. It was peculiar not to feel warm or cold, tired or, rested. To just be. It was, in a way, the perfect Zen state, but Fortunato couldn’t waste time meditating on it. He looked around for some landmarks to orient himself. He found the way north, and headed out over the city.
He flew without sensation, moving over the land without feeling motion on his unseen body. He discovered that he could judge distance, but not time. He did notice that once he’d reached the city line and found the concrete ribbon of the Thruway leading north that the sun had moved in the sky, so time must have passed. Before long—or so, anyway, it seemed—he was gliding over the fields and farms of rural Orange County where New Hampton lay. He knew that he was barely sixty miles north of the city, but he might as well have been in another world, a world of small villages, of dairy farms set among rolling hills, of green pastures, of rich land which grew a multitude of crops, of orchards and pocket forests that had been standing since before the Revolutionary War.
He was not on intimate terms with this part of the state. Like many urbanites he was a city boy through and through, but he was able to call to mind maps he’d seen in the past. He had also burned into his brain—more, burned into his spirit since his brain lay nearly comatose on a hospital bed far away—the image of his son.
He hoped that the boy’s image would lead him to him.
He came upon the camp in a rush while quartering the countryside, thankful that his astral form could see like a hawk. He rushed down, looking for the boy, but could not find him. He dipped into the mind of one of the camp administrators and discovered what had happened the night before, events which even McCoy and Peregrine were unaware of, and fled immediately before his sudden anger could do any damage to the brain he was scanning.
Fortunato burned hot with anger, yet cold with fear. He could feel the sensations run through his astral form because they weren’t physical manifestations, but mental. Fear and anger. Fear of loss. Anger at being afraid. Just what he had fled from, he realized, fifteen years ago. But he couldn’t flee now. His son was out there somewhere. Alone. Afraid. Maybe hurt. He had to find him.
I probably won’t be able to, Fortunato thought. There was too much territory to cover. Besides, the boy would have been spotted by now if he was moving about in the open. He was probably hiding, keeping undercover for fear of the kidnappers who had almost snatched him the night before.
If they haven’t gotten him in the meantime, Fortunato thought, then did his best to dismiss the idea. If they had, he was wasting his time. But he had nothing but time, and the need to fill it with something worthwhile.
Fortunato sank down to the ground and stood in the center of the camp, a ghost among the living. No one saw him. His astral form made no noise for them to hear. They were trying to go about their business as if everything was normal, but of course it wasn’t. There was still speculation as to what had happened the night before, and worries that the bad guys might attack again.
This is useless, he thought. Too much ground to cover. Too many places for the boy to hide. There had to be another way—
There was, Fortunato suddenly realized. If he could do it.
He rose up again into the sky and hung above the camp like an unseen specter. He simply had to try. There was no other recourse.
He had to move his astral body through time as he had through space. It was the only way he could hope to track the movements of John Fortune, and the killers who were after him.