Joaquin Salazar took off his straw hat and rubbed his sweaty forehead with an oily rag, squinting in the noonday sun. Hawk-That-Settles checked the cartons Joaquin had brought out to Santa de Nogueira in his battered pick-up. Canned goods, mostly, and twenty five-litre plastic containers of guaranteed pure-ish water.
"Will she sit up there all day?" Joaquin asked, peering up at the figure squatting on the roof of the chapel.
"Maybe," Hawk shrugged. "Help me get the water inside before it boils in this heat."
"Sure thing, Senor."
Hawk picked up two containers, and humped them into the main hall of the monastery.
The hollow man was inside, just sitting at the table, carving intricate statuettes of cartoon characters with a pocketshiv.
"Ottokar," Hawk said. "Give us a hand."
Dr Proctor looked up, smiled and went out to help Joaquin without saying a word.
Sometimes, Hawk felt he was sharing Santa de Nogueira with a pair of voiceless robots. Krokodil sat on the roof all day and all night, looking to the horizon. Dr Proctor made his carvings. And Hawk-That-Settles looked after the pair of them.
When the water was safely stowed in the perpetually shaded depths of the building, and Joaquin was loaded up with last month's empties, the Mexican deliveryman drove off. He was obviously uncomfortable around the monsters, and wouldn't even consider Hawk's offer of tequila.
Hawk was drinking more now. It was the boredom. That was what had nudged Two-Dogs-Dying towards the bottle on the Reservation. Hawk couldn't get enough tequila brought out to Santa de Nogueira to keep him as drunk as his father had usually been, but he rationed his supply carefully and usually managed to keep the fug in his brain and the fire on his tongue.
Hawk watched Joaquin go. He couldn't remember whether Krokodil or Dr Proctor had spoken at all this month. Joaquin was probably the only person he ever had a conversation with these days. And Indians were supposed to be iron-willed men of few words and many deeds.
The pick-up zig-zagged across the desert, keeping to the rocky patches and away from the treacherous sands. On his first trip out, Joaquin had brought his sons and taken away Dr Proctor's sandcat and all its contents. That had been enough to cover six months provisions. The Salazar family were probably the highest-charging grocery service in the world, Hawk suspected. Last month, Joaquin had announced that the funds generated by the sandcat were at an end, and Hawk had had to hand over the DeLorean Agency tank Krokodil had been driving when they first met. He had negotiated nine months worth of food and water in return for a machine that, with all its inbuilt weapons systems, should pick up twenty or thirty million dollars when smuggled down into Mexico and sold to some would-be generalissimo. When the nine months were up, Hawk didn't know what he would do. By then, he hoped Krokodil would have decided the time had come to return to the world and they could rob a few yakuza filling stations for a grubstake. If not, he would have to fashion a bow and arrows and go out for desert game. He had eaten a catrat or two in his time, but had no wish to revert to the diet. Also, he was a terrible shot.
Joaquin bounced over the horizon, and his sputtering engine noise faded out. Santa de Nogueira was as still and silent as the depths of the sea. This had all been under the sea once. You could still find seashells out under the sand, and the fossil remnants of marine creatures. That had been before the Americas rose out of the water. Hawk had heard that the continent was going down again. Most of the South-East was under a foot of rancid saltwater, and there was a tidal barrage wall around New York City. Eventually, the waters would rush back in a deluge, and swamp everything. After a million years, the tide would come back in. In one of the newsfaxes Joaquin packed his beets in, Hawk read that scientists were rediscovering species long thought extinct. Back in the '20s, they had found the coelacanth, but now there were shoals of trilobites in the Florida Keys. It was as if evolution were throwing itself into reverse gear, as the planet readapted itself for a new prehistory.
He turned away from the gates, and walked back to the hall. Dr Proctor was slumped against one of the interior walls, taking one of his siestas, a makeshift coolie hat of threaded newsfax over his head. He had lost some of his bulk, and tanned like a Mexican. In his torn white pyjamas, he could easily slip over the Rio Grande wall and get lost down amid the latino millions, evading forever the vast, country-wide manhunt that was still searching for him. He hadn't killed anybody since last year, so many of the authorities were listing him as "presumed dead." Krokodil could have killed him at any time, but had never bothered with it. Sometimes, Hawk wondered just how harmless Dr Ottokar Proctor had become since his defeat. He was like a bright four-year-old, mainly keeping to himself but genuinely eager to please. Hawk supposed he was cured, but it was a cure he himself wouldn't have been happy to take. Remembering their guest's earlier career, Hawk occasionally considered slitting his throat just in case. But he didn't. He was an Indian, and he couldn't get rid of all the old ways. The insane were touched by the Great Spirits, and thus sacred.
Krokodil had changed too. Since her elevation to the Sixth Level of Spirituality, the former Jessamyn Bonney had had very little to do with the world. She drank her water and ate her beans, and she stared at the sun and the moon like a ship's look-out waiting for a sail to appear in the blue distance. Otherwise, she just sat while her clothes rotted on her back and her hair grew down to her ankles. She didn't come to his cot in the night any more, having outgrown love when she progressed beyond all other human concerns. Five times in the first four montils after Jesse's transformation, Hawk-That-Settles had left the monsters to their own devices for a few days and walked to Firecreek, the nearest collection of three huts and a gas station that called itself a town, where he traded catrat pelts for tequila, smacksynth and a night with a half-Mex, half-white girl who called herself the Hot Enchilada. But each time he had been more concerned with what Krokodil and Dr Proctor might get up to in his absence. When Krokodil's sail appeared, he knew he had to be there.
His father had come to him in a dream, half his head hanging loose, and told him that he was the last of his line, and that he must stay with the moon woman until the end of her evolutionary cycle. When she surpassed the Seventh Level, he would be allowed to go free and return to the Reservation to bury Two-Dogs with honour. Oh, incidentally, his father added, I'm dead now.
Still, sometimes he wondered whether the Hot Enchilada couldn't be persuaded to move out to Santa de Nogueira for the while.
Dr Proctor had stopped calling him "Tonto," but that was who he was beginning to feel like as he cooked, washed up and housekept for Krokodil. He had been her teacher when they first met, and now he was her domestic slave, never told anything but expected to be at the ready when Kemo Sabe decided it was time to ride off on Silver and rout the rustlers.
It was not yet one in the afternoon. Hawk looked, as he did hundreds of times every day, through the window at Krokodil's perch. She was so unmoving, she might as well have been a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Her hair was growing around her like a luxurious tent.
He opened up a carton with his fingernail, and pulled out a bottle. His last one had been empty a week ago.
He broke the seal and twisted off the cap, then tipped the liquid into his mouth.
Ugh, he thought, firewater heap mighty medicine!
Since Elder Seth went into his coma, on the night Dr Proctor had failed to kill Jessamyn Bonney, there had been a certain amount of panic in Deseret. Roger Duroc had had to cancel a long-planned-for trip to the Antarctic to stay in Salt Lake City. This was a crucial stage of the Great Work, and the Elder's spiritual absence was much felt There had been a minor revolt among the resettlers in the outlying homesteads, triggered by the backfiring of an enzyme-augmented wheat strain that had failed to yield a worthy harvest but had spread a species of croprot among the farmhands. The farmers had marched on the Tabernacle in their dungarees, waving their American Gothic pitchforks while their faces fell off, demanding that the Elder come out and address them. Duroc had had to have some of the ringleaders publicly stoned by his security force, the grim-faced, black-clad Elders whom he had personally trained and drilled in the Old Testament system of law enforcement. Since then, there had been a few stormy council meetings, and a few families had tried to pull up stakes and make it back through the desert to the United States. None of them had managed to cross the state line yet, thanks to Blevins Barricune and the other hunter-killers Duroc had stationed along the border. There had been an information containment problem too, but he had dealt with that by ensuring the accidental crash-landing of a chopperload of newsies and netweb teevee personnel.
But things were overextended. The Church of Joseph could not continue much longer without its figurehead, its fountainhead and its mastermind. Duroc spent a portion of each day in the tankroom, looking at the relaxed, unlined face of the ageless Elder, wondering what dreams he had lost himself in.
He thought it had something to do with the Bonney girl. They were still linked at some psychic level, and her continued existence was draining him of vitally-needed energies. He had considered several programs for eliminating the problem, but given the failure of the Manolo and Proctor options, he did not want to put anything into action without the Elder's say-so. Two failures were quite enough. Another might put his position in jeopardy. Elder Beach had been speaking against him in the councils rather too often lately, and a faction had been gathering around him. Beach would dearly love to take Seth's spectacles for his own, and shoulder the burden of the Great Work. He had his supporters. Sometimes, Duroc questioned the wisdom of using a church to further the Great Work. The Josephites attracted too many impractical fanatics, too many focused but tiny minds, too many desperate need-to-believe lost souls. But Seth had been an accomplice in the creation of the sect, and had nurtured it for more than a hundred and fifty years. It was the instrument he had chosen, shaped and prepared. The Elder knew best.
Duroc paced the isolation chamber. It was as cold as a tomb, and slightly damp, but otherwise resembled a striplit hospital waiting room. The tank was like a cross between a fridge-freezer and an Egyptian sarcophagus, with a clear-glass faceplate inset. The Elder's clothes hung on a curly-hooked old-fashioned coatstand in one corner.
Yesterday, Duroc had had to allow the stoning of Sister Harrison, who had been caught in adultery. In Nguyen Seth's absence, he had been called upon to cast the first stone. Coralie had looked him in the eyes as he tossed the rock, showing the hurt before he struck her. He had tried to make it quick, but the Council of Elders had decreed that she must lie bleeding in front of the Tabernacle for a day and a night. This morning, she was gone, spirited away by the frog-chinned Brother Harrison. Later, Duroc would check up. He wasn't sure whether it would be best for the Sister to live or die. Whatever, he could have no more to do with her. He had engineered the evidence against her, keeping his own name out of it but making sure Brother Shipman and Elder Pompheret were disgraced. She had to suffer, not for her immorality—that was not a question that entered into his thinking—but because she had been with him the night it started to go wrong. She had seen him shivering with terror, and that must be driven from her head.
There were droplets of condensation on the outside of the isolation tank, and the temperature dials were misted over. While in his deepsleep, the Elder drew the little nourishment he found necessary from a biosolution pumped into the waters that lapped around his body. Duroc checked the biosupport system, wiping the glass of the tubefeed monitor. The condensation came off, but the dial was still clouded. It had been abraded until opaque.
A terrible calm descended upon his mind.
He pressed the glass until it shattered. A red-tipped shard speared into the meat of his thumb. He sucked it loose and spat it out. The red froth was startling against the white floor.
It was as he had suspected, the tubefeed had been blocked and the nutrients witheld.
The double doors opened, and men clad in the dark suits of the Josephite Council of Elders pressed in, surrounding him. They had some security staff wim them, discreetly armed.
"Elder Beach?" Duroc greeted their obvious leader.
"Blessed be. Brother Duroc. It has been decided. I am to head the Council until Elder Seth has recovered. We have taken a vote. It was unanimous."
Duroc looked from face to face. They were mostly unrepentant, but Elder Wiggs glanced away from his gaze at the crucial moment. His body tensed. The confined space would tell in his favour, and he thought he could kill Beach and most of the others before the security people shot him down. But he couldn't risk a ricochet puncturing the tank. The Elder might be comatose almost to the point of catalepsy, but he still clung to life.
"We have come for your approval," Beach said. "As the Elder's Executive Assistant, your palmprint is necessary to access the datanets. You must realize that this is the only path we can take."
The biosupport unit hummed, and something gurgled inside. Wiggs was pointing with a shaking finger.
"Look…"
Duroc turned. There were clear refuse tubes leading from the tank to the floor, feeding into the drains. Purple-threaded liquid was passing through the tubes. The tank was emptying.
Beach's tanned face paled in an instant. Someone began to mutter a prayer. Duroc wondered whether he was pleading with God for the Elder's return to life or consignment to death.
"I cannot give my approval to your suggestion, Elder Beach," said Duroc. "Matters such as this are not in my jurisdiction. If you want to take over the council, you will have to settle the affair with Elder Seth himself."
There was a hydraulic hiss, and the tankseal was broken. Dry-ice smoke puffed out and descended like white candyfloss to the floor.
Duroc turned. A thin, naked arm stretched out of the tank, pushing up the lid.
Nguyen Seth sat up, the electrodes falling from his white, hairless chest.
The Elder smiled. "A welcoming committee?"
Beach bowed low, trembling. "Yes, Elder."
"How gratifying. Roger, bring me my robe."
Duroc handed him a black kimono from the coatstand. He knotted it about his middle, and stepped out of the tank as spryly as if he had just lain down for a mid-day catnap and awoken refreshed rather than been in a near-death state for the better part of a year.
"Elder Beach," Seth said. "I am calling a Council meeting in the Central Conclave of the Tabernacle. See to it that the Inner Circle are all assembled within an hour. The timing is vital."
Beach backed out through his crowd of supporters, most of whom trailed after him, crushing through the doors in an undignified retreat. Elder Wiggs remained, speechless, his eyes fixed on Seth.
"Elder Wiggs?" said Nguyen Seth. "Have you no business to be about?"
Wiggs apologized, and ran off.
Seth laughed, and Duroc felt the chill of the room.
"Roger, we must be strong. This day's work will not be easeful, nor overly pleasant."
Duroc bowed his head.
"We must call to one of the Dark Ones to deal with the Moon Woman…"
A shiver began in Duroc's spine, but he held it in, refusing to let his shoulders shake.
"We must summon up the Jibbenainosay."
Dr Ottokar Proctor was content with his life. He had food, shelter and an interest. He needed nothing more. His knife flicked away at the hardwood, etching in the eyes of Michigan J. Frog, one-time-only star of Chuck Jones' classic One Froggy Evening (1955). First, he found the character inside the wood, then he cut away to create a rough approximation, and finally he did the fine work with the knifepoint. In the last few months, he had whittled away at the remnants of furniture which still cluttered up the monastery, creating a horde of Bugs Bunnies, Daffy Ducks, Road Runners, Coyotes, Sylvesters, Tweety-Pies, Elmer Fudds, Foghorn Leghorns, Pepe le Pews, Speedy Gonzalezes, Yosemite Sams and Porky Pigs. He kept returning to these archetypes, rendering them in each and every one of their multifarious moods. He had a Daffy with pointed teeth bared in his bill, building up to an explosive rage, and a Coyote with eyeballs twice the size of the rest of him, appalled at the approaching doom unleashed by an inexpressive, beep-beeping bird. Now, he had run through the roster of Warner Brothers' major characters, he was applying himself to the lesser-known greats: forgotten stars from the '30s like Bosko the Talkink Kid and his girlfriend Honey, Foxy, Piggy and Fluffy, Goopy Geer, Buddy and Cookie, and that proto-Elmer Fudd, Egghead; and memorable but unprolific creations like Marvin the Martian, Witch Hazel, Hippety Hopper, Private Snafu, Spike and Chester, Claude Cat, Henery Hawk, Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog from Ready, Woolen and Able (1960), the pathetic Merlin the Magic Mouse, Second Banana and Cool Cat. If there was anyone missing from the line-up, he couldn't think of him…
Inside his mind, there was a non-stop chase, as his carvings pursued each other through doors in the ceiling, dodged falling battleships, pulled off and replaced their heads, dressed up as busty cheerleaders with lipsticky, heart-shaped mouths and spit curls, swallowed exploding firecrackers, were reduced to charcoal briquettes and reassembled, switched on and off the lightbulbs over their heads, shot each other with ever larger guns, and reduced rivals to their essential atoms. Elmer Fudd shushed the audience with "be vewwy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits!" Marvin the Martian disappeared in the beam of a disintegrator ray as Space Cadet Porky Pig sneered "take that, you thing from another world you!" Daffy Duck dropped 126 storeys inside an icebox while Bugs snickered "ain't I the stinker?" The Road Runner beep-beeped, and the Coyote ordered earthquake pills, boulder suits ('impress your friends—be a rock!') and economy-size holes from the Acme Mail Order company. It was Rabbit Season, it was Duck Season. There was non-stop music, and bright colour, and no one was ever hurt. His creations were destroyed and remade in the time it takes to cut from one shot to another.
Dr Ottokar Proctor smiled to himself. He had finally found the world of his dreams.
But on the wharf, waiting for Bugs and Daffy, was a parcel, freighted all the way from Tasmania, with breathing holes cut into it. Inside the parcel, bright eyes shone with hunger, with greed, with irrational and unstoppable violence…
Soon, Bugs and Daffy would open the crate, and the Devil would be free again.
Nguyen Seth was much relaxed by his spell in the isolation tank. His spirit had been drawn to the edge of the Outer Darkness and been in communion with the Dark Ones. Ba'alberith, the Mythwrhn, Nyarlathotep and the Jibbenainosay were gathered on the lip of the funnel that led down to the Earth, vast and formless, their energies gathering as they merged into one mass of power, then recreated themselves as distinct entities. Too much time spent in the world of men had robbed Seth of his appreciation for those whom he served. It was too easy to be distracted by the petty concerns of the Elders of Joseph, by the ridiculous politicking of the countries and corps of the world, by the confused tangle of personal relationships. His mindlink with Jessamyn Bonney had dragged him too deep into the mire of humanity, tainted his purpose with hatred, love, desire. When the girl became one with the Ancient Adversary, his entire being had screamed in an inexpressible agony. He had nearly been dislodged from his earthly form, and only been able to survive by slipping into his trance, allowing his spirit to wander, unfettered by the concerns of his flesh…
The Dark Ones had been angered by the ascendancy of their enemy, and Seth had a mind-stretching vision of the eternal wars, feuds, rivalries and alliances of the Outer Darkness. The business to which his everlasting life was devoted was but one of a series of skirmishes fought on planes beyond even his understanding, between forces he could only vaguely comprehend. As Ba'alberith and the Mythwrhn combined their essences like gases creating a liquid, Seth realized just how alien these beings were, not only to his human perceptions—it took a spell in the Outer Darkness to remind him how close to humankind he really was, just one step beyond their tininess—but to the entire matter of the physical universe through which the Earth spun like a forgotten ball of mud and water. The Dark Ones had their histories, their cultures, their tragedies, their humours, but they were beyond anything he could even imagine. Time had no meaning in the Darkness, but the entire span of terrestrial history was but a brief armistice in the war between the Three Shades of Dark and the forces of Nullification. A myriad parallel universes were bunched together in a knot tied by Azathoth, the Crawling Chaos, and the Dark Ones were penetrating his own reality just as the Nullifiers were infiltrating other timelines. He had a vision of other Nguyen Seths, living through other eternities, under other names, and he was able to pick out the billion specks that were the multiple souls his lives had touched.
As a lesson to him, Ba'alberith had allowed him to dip into an alternate in which he was a fearsome sorcerer, rotting behind a mask in a seven-turreted castle at the edge of a great empire, doing battle with swordsmen, magicians and a leech lady. Seth was whipped through this life in an instant, from a violent clash on a primordial plane to another, fifteen thousand blood-soaked years later, in the heart of his castle. It was over within the blinking of an eye. From this experience, Seth learned the futility of a pure devotion to self. In that life, he had been simply obsessed with his continuing existence, with the gratification of his every whim and impulse. Upon his death, he had left nothing behind him in that universe except dust and bad memories. When he returned to his Earth, to the course of his history, he would be humbled.
He would live purely to do the bidding of the Dark Ones, happy in the knowledge that in his servitude his life would mean something. He was the man born to end the world, and he would leave behind him the void through which the Dark Ones could have access to his physical universe, the predestined site of their Great Tourneys, the killing games from which would emerge the Three Champions of the Night who would join battle with the Nullifiers for the fate of the eternally expanding Empire of the Actual and its infinite number of Shadow Selves.
All this was far in the future, far beyond any physical life he could expect, but he knew he would be present in some altered form at the end of the conflict. From the lip of the funnel, he saw the timelines spiralling away into the Darkness. The culmination of his struggles was within his grasp, and beyond that was the restful blackness of the Nothing that would be the lot of the peoples of the Earth. He would bring them a merciful oblivion, freeing them from the need to endure through another cycle of pain and suffering as the whole story was played out again.
This was the future, he knew; but it was also the past. The Outer Darkness was set sideways against the progress of time…
He stepped back into his body at various points through his long career, reinforcing his original decisions, initiating sequences of action whose consequences would only become apparent as the 20th Century drew to its fiery close. He relived his finest moments, his memories becoming the realer as he sped through them, cannonballing through his own life towards the Nguyen Seth who waited in his tank in Salt Lake City.
Back in the world, he was possessed by the needs of his flesh, and took the time to satiate himself before gathering the Twelve Elders of Joseph in the Central Chamber of the Tabernacle.
Back on the lip of the funnel, the Jibbenainosay gathered itself, the alien matter of a hundred universes concentrating in the centre of its cloud, vast discharges of world-shattering electricity signifying its thought processes.
Seth had taken a tendril of the Jibbenainosay with him to the world, and now he would have to pull the whole being through the funnel, and turn it loose. As he strode through the corridors of the Tabernacle, Roger Duroc at his side, Seth felt the ache in his gut where the tendril ended in a diamond-hard fragment of concentrated matter.
The hurt was growing as the Jibbenainosay squeezed itself towards reality, lusting titanically for the destruction of its adversary……of its Ancient Adversary.
A clawed hand reached into his dream, and shook him awake.
Hawk-That-Settles started up in his cot, the blanket falling away from his nakedness, and the claw was around his heart, squeezing.
He forgot his dream, but the world he awoke to was nightmare enough.
The room was full of moonlight, and Krokodil was standing there, cloaked by her hair.
He saw a woman, but he felt the presence of a ghost.
She spoke, in her old voice. "Something is coming through," she said. "We must fight again."
He didn't know what to say. He had emptied a bottle before stumbling to his cot. His thinking was muddied by sleep and tequila, and he felt worse than he would have if he'd been kicked in the head by a mule.
She walked over to the bed, seeming to glide, her hair rippling.
She knelt, hair parting over her body as she stretched her arms out to him. Pale in the light of the full moon, she was lovely.
This was part of the story of the Moon Woman. His father had told him many times of the lucky brave whom the Goddess selected as her lover, and of the many heroic deeds he would later perform.
He wanted her—not just physically, his entire spirit wanted to join with this unearthly creature—and yet he was afraid. When her cool fingers touched him, he stiffened, and shrank away, feeling the stone wall behind his back.
She was not offended by hjs reluctance, and slipped easily into the narrow cot, pressing the length of her body against his.
Underneath her hair, she wore nothing.
She kissed him on the lips, passing a little of her cool to him. She wasn't even wearing her eyepatch. His eyes open as they kissed, he found himself looking past her fluttering eyelids, first at her clear, green right eye, alive and intelligent, then at the blue crystal facet of her optic burner, dead and deadly. He shut his eyes, and she sucked his tongue into her mouth. Her hands moved up and down his body, tracing the lines of old sandfighting scars, probing the untidiness under his right lung where his ribs had been broken and set out of true.
He touched her, smoothing her flesh. Krokodil felt different from Jesse. He could no longer feel the machinery inside her, as if it had been digested, truly becoming one with her living tissue and bone. Her skin felt silky and cool like a beautiful snake's, and her muscle tone was superb, no longer that of a soldier but of an athlete, a dancer.
With Jesse, lovemaking had been often hurried, rough. She hadn't known her newfound strength, and often left him bruised or even bleeding. They had found pleasure in sex, but no true union. Had their son been born, his spirit would have been divided against itself, the product of two people too wrapped up in themselves to care fully for each other. Now, with Krokodil, it was different. She was confident enough to take him slowly, to caress and cajole him, to prolong their climaxes. Hawk couldn't think of himself as he moved together with her. The memories that came to him were of her; no, they were hers. She was leaking her past into him, just as she was sipping his spirit…
Jessamyn, Jazzbeaux, Jesse, Frankenstein's Daughter. He loved all the fragments of the person she was still becoming…
…if only, he wondered, he could love Krokodil.
When it was over, they lay awake in each other's arms, their bodies too charged and relaxed for sleep, and Hawk's fugitive spirit returned, plunging him back into himself.
They didn't move. The moonlight fell on their bodies, dappling them as if with a skin disease.
Hating himself for it. Hawk wondered if he was being rewarded, consoled or persuaded.
The moon set, and daylight inched into the room.
"Tonight," she said to him. "It will come. Hawk-That-Settles, you must help me get ready for it."
The Inner Circle sat around the table, nervously waiting. Elder Beach was doodling on a notepad, crosses, goats, and skulls with Josephite hats. Roger Duroc stood by the door as Nguyen Seth walked around the room, taking a full, slow circuit of the table. He seemed to pause momentarily behind each Elder, and to a man they tensed as if expecting a killing blow.
"Brothers," said Seth, assuming his seat. "I have gathered you here to demonstrate that the Path of Joseph is never smooth."
The Elders mumbled in collective agreement. Seth smiled, and adjusted his mirrorshades. He still seemed bleached from his spell in the tank, and the mirrorholes made his face look like a grinning skull.
"We must make sacrifices if our Great Work is to be achieved."
Someone said "amen," and other people nodded.
"Blood sacrifices."
This was nothing new.
Seth signalled to Duroc, and he stepped forward.
"Please take any belongings you have left on the table off," he said.
Beach picked up his pad. Elder Hawkins, the financial comptroller of the church, shifted his briefcase. The table was covered with a stiff circle of linoleum. Duroc rolled it up, and took it away.
The table beneath was inset with a series of shallow channels, all feeding into a central funnel.
Everyone looked at the hole in the middle of the table. Suspended in the air by no apparent means was an irregular lump of crystal. It spun slowly, silvery chips in its core catching the light.
Duroc dimmed the lights. The Inner Circle were enraptured by the crystal.
"This is a simple tool for the focusing of our spiritual energies," Seth said. "It is not especially elaborate. I did not foresee that such a great effort on our part would be necessary until some time nearer the fulfilment of our purpose, but M. Duroc has done his best with the materials at hand."
Nobody turned to look at Duroc. He knew this was where the spooky stuff began again.
The crystal rose a little, floating a few inches above the level of the table. It pulsed now, seeming to change its solid form as it spun, faster and faster.
"I would ask you to concentrate your prayers on the Cynosure."
Beach was sweating, but could not take his eyes away from the crystal. The others mainly seemed hypnotized, completely lost in the Cynosure's spell.
There was a blot of darkness in the centre of the Cynosure now, an absence of matter.
"Roger," Seth said. "Bring it to me."
Duroc took the dagger out of his pocket. It was old, and he had no idea what its culture of origin could have been. The handle had once been covered in carved designs, but many hands had worn these away to suggestive shapes. The blade was long, thin and honed to perfection. Carefully, Duroc gave the instrument to Seth. The Elder held it up, catching the light along its silvered edge.
With his left hand, Seth unfastened the tags on his kimono and bared his chest. The Inner Circle observed with interest, and just a touch of dread.
Duroc's hand settled on the butt of the revolver slung in the small of his back, under his coat. He had orders not to allow anyone to break the circle.
"Brothers, I beseech your blessings upon the endeavour of this day."
The chorused "amen" was ragged, unenthusiastic.
Seth stood up, allowing his robe to fall open. He touched the point of the dagger to a spot an inch above his knotted navel, and eased the tip inside him. His jaw was set, and he contained a groan as he slipped the metal into his flesh.
Elder Curran put a hand over his mouth to contain his disgust.
Inch by inch, Nguyen Seth fed the dagger into his body. No blood flowed from the wound. Seth's shoulders heaved as he probed the inside of his stomach, and he choked back yelps of pain.
Elder Javna tried to stand up, but Duroc placed a hand on his shoulder, gently forcing him back into his seat.
Seth gave out a cry and put out his hands to steady himself against the table. The dagger shook, and slowly slid out of the wound, as if pushed by something inside the man's vitals.
He grabbed the handle, and shifted the blade in the hole, enlarging it. A light came from inside him, a violet-white light. He withdrew the dagger and dropped it. His stomach was heaving now, the slit pulsating as something inside tried to be born.
With his fingers, he peeled the lips of the aperture away, and the light shot out. It moved fast, and struck the Cynosure. There was a flash and everyone covered their eyes. Blinking, Duroc looked at the crystal. The darkness at its heart was replaced with the light from inside Seth, and the light was rhythmically pounding like a beating heart.
Seth was chanting now, in a language Duroc had heard before but could not identify. He spoke the words of a ritual that was old when continents were young.
As he chanted, some of the Elders joined in, infiltrating newer prayers into his rite. The words didn't matter, just the feelings. Seth massaged his wound, smoothing it shut, and it seemed to shrink, to pucker into a second navel.
Yellow fluid was leaking from the corner of his mouth as he continued to speak the words of power.
Elder Wiggs had his hands locked together in traditional prayer, and his eyes jammed shut. Nothing he could do could make this go away.
Apart from the ceremony, Duroc was awed by its beauty. He tried to look away from the Cynosure, but was incapable of heeding any distraction. The crystal was expanding now, almost like an egg swelled to the point of bursting by a hatchling.
Hawkins screamed, his cry lost in the rising chant. Many voices were issuing from Seth's mouth now, a choir lodged in his throat. Hawkins grabbed his chest and struggled in his seat. The man had a history of angina, Duroc knew. He was having a seizure. Perhaps a fatal seizure. Nobody made a move to help him. He spasmed. kicking the tablelegs, his hands twitching on the table, fingertips scrabbling at the channels.
Seth held out the dagger, and passed it to the Elder on his right hand, Curran. The handsome man, a former televangelist, examined it as if it were a fine cigar, but had no idea what to do with it. Duroc stepped in and showed him, pulling Curran's sleeve away from his wrist, and tracing a line along the artery from hand's heel to the inside of the elbow.
He had once explained it in a lecture to the Violent Tendency on avoiding torture. "Find something sharp, and bare your arm. Remember, across—for the hospital. Along—for the morgue."
Poking his tongue out with concentration, Curran stuck the dagger into his wrist, and pulled it down. He was inexpert, but he severed the artery. Blood gushed, and fell onto the table. His hand fell, and the wrist continued to pump out blood. The red trickle flowed into the channel, and towards the Cynosure.
Wiggs picked up the knife, crossed himself, and struck down with such force that he nearly severed his left hand. He smiled as if relieved, and his blood joined Curran's.
"No," said the next Elder, half-rising. Duroc thumb-jabbed him in the back of the neck, forced his head down onto the table, and slit his throat. The channels were thick with blood now.
Seth's chanting was a deafening thunder now.
"Joseph is merciful," said Elder Javna, surgically opening his wrist, "Joseph is…"
Next was Hawkins. Duroc put the dagger in his leaping hand, but he couldn't get a proper grip on it. Duroc made as if to take the knife himself, but suddenly the Elder found his last strength. He took the blade, and thrust it at his burning heart. Duroc heard metal scrape bone. After a brief and bloody frenzy, Hawkins fell forwards. He must have been the first of the Inner Circle to die.
Most of them didn't have to be prompted. Those who hesitated, shut their eyes and did the deed after a touch from Duroc.
Beach was the last. He opened his throat with resignation, knowing he had no choice. Duroc took the dagger from him, and wiped it off with a handkerchief.
Seth's chant slowed to a whisper.
The twelve Elders of Joseph slowly emptied, their flowing blood picking out intricate patterns in the shallow bowl of the table. The Cynosure was splattered red, and still pulsed.
Then, it imploded, shrinking to a red dot with an audible pop as air rushed into the vacuum where the crystal had been. Electrical discharges crackled, and the dead and dying men writhed, cries wrung from their throats. Beach stood up, a bib of blood standing out on his black vest. He half-turned and collapsed, as if the life were suddenly whipped out of him.
There was a smell of ozone in the air. Duroc saw Elder Curran's plump face shrink onto his skull in an instant, all the moisture sucked somehow out of his corpse.
The red dot shot up into the air like a firefly, and exploded. Nguyen Seth finished his rite, and sat down, exhausted, among his dead followers.
Duroc saw the dot whizzing up into the vaulted arches of the Tabernacle. The central chamber was a hundred and twenty feet high, and the light was careening off the ceiling.
There was a great wind. Hawkins' briefcase came open, and a storm of papers circled like a tornado.
Duroc suddenly felt tired, as if all his strength were being sapped in a single draught. He sank to his knees, his head swimming, and held fast to one of the chairs. A great weight seemed to fall upon him, pushing him downwards.
The floor was covered in sticky blood.
He tried to raise his head, to look up, but couldn't.
Above him, floating under the domes of the Tabernacle was something vast, unearthly and hungry. It had forced itself through into the world with Nguyen Seth, and nourished itself on the lives of the Elders of Joseph.
Duroc was surrounded by hanging tentacles, as if an unimaginably huge jellyfish were hovering above him. The tendrils brushed him, but did no harm. He felt almost lulled by the contact. The sensations they brought were entirely new, beyond pleasure or pain. It would be easy to sit here forever under this shower, exploring the new feelings.
Then the tentacles were gone.
"Roger," said Seth. "Permit me to present to you one of the Dark Ones whom we serve."
Duroc forced himself to look up at the enormous, amorphous entity that hung above them. It was beautiful, it was terrible. He had been expecting an angel, a demon or a monster, but this was none of those. This was a prodigy, an anomaly. He wasn't sure it actually existed. Its surface rippled as if it were a liquid, or a turbulent gas contained in a molecule-thin balloon of living matter. It had eyes, faces, mouths, hands, but they were like nothing Duroc had seen on any earthly creature. Inside it somewhere, organs pumped and pulsed and squirted. It had a smell, a taste, a sound.
For the first time since leaving the seminary, Roger Duroc felt like worshipping something.
The Jibbenainosay descended. No, it expanded downwards, extruding thick feelers with tips like clawed mouths. One slunk towards Duroc, but his raised hand warded it away, and it fastened instead on the dead head of Elder Hawkins.
Other tentacles came for the other corpses. Some burrowed through the black cloth covering the backs of men who had fallen face-forward onto the table, some attached to hands, some to shoulders, some to stomachs. One clasped Beach by the face, and dug through his head, swelling his neck as it latched onto the inside of his chest.
"It needs flesh, Roger," said Seth.
"Why have you brought it here?"
The Elder took off his dark glasses. His eyes gleamed.
"The Krokodil must die."
VII.
Krokodil needed him now. She used up three days' water cleaning herself off, and asked him to cut her hair. Using a stiletto she gave him, he did his best to shear away her black tent, and then she tied what was left up in a knot. She looked a little like some of the women on the Reservation. She found her eyepatch, and slipped it on. Then she dressed in clean clothes, and sat cross-legged in the courtyard. Hawk-That-Settles sensed her nervousness, her uncertainty. If this was the Sixth Level of Spirituality, he was glad to remain comparatively unenlightened. For a moment, she was the old Jesse, then she was the coldblooded reptile woman again. The song was drawing to its close. In some old movie he had seen, there was an Indian who got up every morning, looked around, and said "this is a good day to die." He had thought that absurd. He had a bottle of tequila left, but he just poured it out and watched it seep into the sand.
"Gentlemen, I'm afraid this is all completely beyond me. My background is purely in the military uses of satellite technology."
"Mr President, this is completely beyond all of us. It's an anomaly we can't explain, like the business with the Sea of Tranquillity last year."
"Run the stats by me again, General Pendarves."
"Well, one of our geostationary spy satellites was knocked off course last year by an electrical failure. Its orbit has been deteriorating ever since, and we expect it to burn up sometime in late 1999. We have not been able to control it, but we have still been able to get data from its sensors."
"So we've been peeking in backyards?"
"More or less. Until recently, we've just been able to track a few wolves and trappers in the Canadian wastes. But three weeks ago, we had another kink in the course, and the damn thing ended up over Utah."
"Deseret, General. Deseret. We renamed it, remember? It was a plank of the election platform."
"Yes sir, Deseret. Since it's only notionally United States territory, we saw no harm in taking a look. Some of the reports that have been creeping back have been disturbing."
"I have every confidence in Nguyen Seth, gentlemen. He is a true example of the pioneer spirit that has made this country great."
"Yes, yes, yes…but there are things going on in Salt Lake that we have no explanations for. Mr Fenin has been monitoring them."
"There have been disturbances."
"What, earthquakes? Typhoons?"
"Maybe, Mr President. But along with that they have an assortment of phenomena we have no handle on. Mr Fenin is from our ESP division."
"Mr Fenin?"
"Mr President."
"We turned the data over to him."
"And…?"
"And I have a few precedents for this, but nothing that makes sense. There's an immense power source of some sort in Salt Lake City, apparently in the depths of the Josephite Tabernacle itself."
"But the Josephites are back-to-the-Iand types, surely. They're not tekkies. They wouldn't set up a nuclear power plant, would they?"
"Not that kind of power, sir. Non-physical power. We haven't really got a name for it. Psychic force, spiritual energy, call it what you will."
"The United States of America does not recognize ghosties and ghoulies, Mr Fenin. And I can't recall authorizing any expenditure for a department of magical crackpots!"
"Sir, if you'll recall, the Soviets are very advanced in this field. The previous administration felt there was a psychic gap. President Heston appointed James Earl Carter to head the Commission."
"Balloon juice, gentlemen. I won't hear any of this."
"But, Mr President, there is every possibility of some cataclysmic force being unleashed…"
"That is abject nonsense, and you are aware of it. I believe it might be time to relieve you of your command, General."
"Mr President…"
"I'll hear no more of this. Mr Fenin, good day. General Pendarves, you will report to this office tomorrow for reassignment. The issue is closed. Ghosts…pah!"
Dr Ottokar Proctor saw the Indian cutting the woman's hair, and kept out of their way. Afterwards, he went into the cell, and gathered up the hair. It was soft, and smelled sweet. He wanted it.
Inside his mind, a crate from Tasmania shook. Nails came loose.
His eyes focused properly. His knife slipped as he was working on Bugs' teeth, and he cut himself.
Licking his finger, he tasted blood.
"Your holiness, we believe the ground zero will be in Southern Arizona, near the Mexican border. In the Gila Desert."
Pope Georgi I looked at the mapscreen. Father O'Shaughnessy amplified the projection and narrowed down the area.
"Somewhere about here." He tapped the screen with his pointer.
"What's this name?"
"Santa de Nogueira. It's an old monastery."
"Ours?"
"It was, but it's been empty for over a century and a half. We still own the ground, but only through a Spanish land grant that probably has no legal status."
"Is anybody there?"
"Somebody must be, or the demon wouldn't be on its way."
"Who?" .
O'Shaugnessy lit his pipe. "There, Holy Father, you have me. Cardinal Mapache is scouting the area…"
"The prophet?"
"He's an esper, Holiness."
"Indeed."
"He is trying to divine any presences in the monastery."
"Results?"
O'Shaugnessy exhaled smoke. "Mixed. There are at least three people in the building, probably refugees from justice. The deserts are full of criminal factions, juvenile delinquents. But it's not the people who interest Mapache."
The Pope frowned. "Continue."
"There seems to be a supernatural presence."
"A demon?"
"That's hard to say. It is attached somehow to one of the people, but not in a standard possession. Mapache says they have formed some sort of gestalt."
"Is that orthodox?"
"The Holy Spirit has spoken through human beings before. The son of God took mortal flesh."
"You are flirting with blasphemy."
"Blasphemy and I are just good friends. Holy Father."
The Pope smiled.
"Can we get anyone there in time?"
"Mapache says no. Sister Chantal is busy in Kamchatka, and Mouier Kazuko Hara is still convalescing. I don't think we have anyone else qualified to handle something like this."
"Your suggestions?"
O'Shaughnessy spread his hands. "Prayer, Holy Father."
Duroc watched the Jibbenainosay disappear into the sky like a Montgolfier balloon, and was relieved to see the thing getting further away from him. It still trailed its corpses like puppets, and had sprouted some non-organic looking appendages that seemed capable of doing plenty of severe damage. He got the impression that even Nguyen Seth wasn't exactly unhappy to see the Dark One off on its way to get Jessamyn Bonney.
Duroc couldn't believe that it had come to this. The Jibbenainosay was something you called up if you wanted to sink Antarctica, not take out an eighteen-year-old girl. Of course, the Manolo and Proctor options hadn't proved effective. Jessamyn—Krokodil, she was calling herself now—was demonstrating an unsuspected resilience. Still, she would have no chance against the Dark One.
Then, Duroc supposed, Seth would have the problem of finding something else to keep the Jibbenainosay occupied.
It didn't rain any more, but sometimes this part of the desert was visited by violent sandstorms. Hawk-That-Settles thought one was coming along. At the height of the afternoon, the wind began to blow gently, and sand drifted against the walls of Santa de Nogueira. He hadn't seen Dr Proctor around all day, but that didn't worry him. It would probably be time to gather the womenfolks indoors, board up the windows and sit tight until it blew over. But he knew Krokodil wasn't going to be be the proper squaw and let him protect her from the elements. She stood on her chapel roof, looking unblinking to the North as the sand blew in her face.
Erich Von Richter, born Ethan Ryker, pulled back the joystick and lifted his Fokker up over the turbulence. He had been with the Red Baron for three years now, giving air cover for the Flying Circus's raids. They only had two planes, but the rest made do with Kustom Kars kitted out with razor-edged biplane wings and machete-blade propellors.
The convoy was down on the road, drawing level with a couple of eighteen-wheelers. He was alone in the skies today, because the Baron had some business with the yaks in Welcome. He was turning over a percentage of the scav for a tankerload of fuel, and an extension of the warranty on the Fokkers.
Von Richter loved flying, but he didn't care for the aerobatics that were the Baron's special thrill. He much preferred laying down a blanket of napalm in front of an interstate wrapper, or opening up with his twin burpguns, kicking up ruts in the road and puncturing the running groundrats.
His old man had sprayed crops for a living, back when there were crops. This was a much better way to use the skies.
"Yo, Rikki," said Heidi in his earchip. She was groundleader for the day. "We have the camels in sight. Are you available?"
"There's some weird whirlwind effect up here."
"If you can't handle it, we'll be okay without you, flyboy."
Heidi was always taunting him, jockeying for his plane. "Nothing I can't breeze through, roadcrawler. Remember, you're talking to an ace."
He dipped the bird's nose into the turbulence and swooped down. It was rougher than he had thought. The stick jarred in his hands, bruising his palms.
The motors cut out and the Fokker fell thirty feet like a deadweight before they cut in again. That shouldn't happen.
"Flyboy, what are you freaking around for? This is combat, here. Squirt some lighter fluid on those trucks and leave it to the Arizona Korps."
He didn't answer Heidi. He was too busy with the stick, trying to regain control of the biplane.
Suddenly, he was surrounded by a cloud. No, there were no clouds in the Big Empty. It must be smoke. It was black and thick, as if night had fallen in an instant. It wasn't like regular air. The instruments weren't responding properly.
Von Richter shivered as the temperature fell. Ice formed inside his goggles, and his sweat crystallized.
The engine stopped, and he tried to scream. A gust froze his throat.
The Fokker didn't fall. It was suspended in the black cloud.
"Rikki, what is that freaking thing up there? Tell me I'm having a GloJo flashback."
Von Richter thumbed his gun controls and the guns chattered, spinning bullets and cartridge casings into the black. They emptied quickly, but he still kept pressing.
This was serious weird shit.
A face ten feet across appeared in the blackness. It was more or less human. Von Richter screamed, and beat his hands against the ribbed canvas.
The face's thick lips opened, and a white beak pushed out, opening three ways. A violet thing shot out of the beak, and latched onto Von Richter's face.
Tiny filaments threaded instantaneously through his entire body, and there was a mighty tug as the black thing turned him inside-out.
The Fokker fell out of the sky, and crashed into the sand, surrounded by chunks of ice. Pieces of Erich Von Richter rained down around the wreckage.
The Jibbenainosay sped onwards, towards the South, thinking less of its latest prey than a desert wanderer does a single grain of sand.
The Arizona Korps didn't stop to bury their ace.
Dr Proctor had been polishing his knife. When the Indian came into the wine cellar, he looked up, teeth bared again. "Hello, Tonto," he said.
The Ancient Adversary was puzzled. The Vessel was not what he had expected, not the titanic being that could bestride a world and wrestle mind-to-mind with the Dark Ones.
This Jessamyn Bonney was so fragile, so slim, like a butterfly. It knew a moment of doubt. Then, it firmed its resolve.
It was shrunken inside Jessamyn now, inside Krokodil.
Alone, Nguyen Seth sat in his library. The Jibbenainosay was on the loose, and Krokodil could not withstand it.
Inside his mind, he could still hear her: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…
He opened a book, but could not concentrate on the text, could not even recognize the language in which it was written.
This distraction must end soon. There were things to be done. He had another demon to summon, a subtler fiend, and a more complicated enemy to be struck down.
The Jesuits were becoming a nuisance. He would have to do something about the Vatican.
The sand was blowing hard now, stinging her face. This was the first sign of the Jibbenainosay.
She remembered her dead foes: Daddy Bruno, Miss Liberty, eyeless Holm Rodriguez, Susie Spam-in-the-Can Terhune, Bronson Manolo. And Dr Proctor, not dead but neutralized.
Behind all the faces, she saw Elder Seth.
The Krokodil part of her knew what was coming, what the Jibbenainosay was, and it was afraid. That was a first for it.
The Jessamyn Bonney part didn't care any more.
On the road, Trooper Nathan Stack was concentrating on the screen, wondering again whether he should try to be reassigned. He didn't know whether riding with Leona was a good idea after their break-up, but he wasn't sure if he could stand the thought of some other grunt drawing the duty. Sergeant Leona Tyree handled the United States Cavalry cruiser with expert ease. They had had a call-in from an interstate convoy, out of Phoenix for the East. Someone hadn't paid off the yaks, and a polite oriental gentleman in a suit had made a scrambled telephone call, and the Arizona Korps were cutting loose again.
Stack saw a shower of blips on the screen. "Dead ahead, Leona. Five ve-hickles. They're stalled."
Then, the whole screen lit up, a solid mass of light.
The cruiser swerved as Tyree looked over at the radar, but she got it back on the hardtop.
The glitch was gone.
"What was that?"
Stack tapped the screen. "According to this heap of junk, that was a flying object the size of the U.S.S. Nimitz."
Tyree laughed. "You startled me there. I'll have the system stripped and overhauled when we get back to Fort Apache."
"Yeah."
A thought occurred to him. "Say, Leona, do you want me to log it as a UFO?"
Tyree sneered. "Nahhh. That gag's stale already."
The Jibbenainosay cleaved through the air, gradually delighting in the unfamiliar sensations of physical existence. The human brains it had absorbed taught it much about this universe. Its new form was awkward in some ways, but there were things about it that offered possibilities.
It had never had things to hurt before. It found that it enjoyed inflicting pain. Even more, it relished taking away the spark of life from these scumspeck beings.
Soon, this universe would belong to the Dark Ones.
"Dr Proctor, you're…?"
"Better?" The Devil laughed in his face. "Yes, I suppose I am."
Hawk-That-Settles was backed up against a winerack. The bottles were long gone, but in their nests were a series of figurines. This was where Dr Proctor stored his cartoon creations.
The Devil had his whittling knife, and was making leisurely passes with it, just under Hawk's nose.
"There's a storm coming, isn't there Tonto? I can feel it in the air."
"Yes. A bad one."
"Do you perhaps know anything about the history of your people?"
Hawk gulped, the shining knifepoint a hair's breadth away from his adam's apple.
"Of course you do. You are a Son of Geronimo, are you not?"
Hawk nodded his head.
"Do you know what General Phil Sheridan, the war hero, said…"
Hawk knew what was coming next.
"'The only good Indians I ever saw,' old Phil said, 'were dead.'"
Hawk's eyes went to the doorway. It was too far off. He would never make it.
"Tonto, how would you like to be a good Indian?"
She remembered Doc Threadneedle trying to tell her to stay human. She supposed he wouldn't have been proud of her.
The horizon was invisible now, the air thick with sand. She could hear the Jibbenainosay coming through the whirling winds.
Krokodil hoped there was a way she could make it up to the Doc.
Where was Hawk-That-Settles? He should be here to see her take the final steps, to see her progress to the Seventh Level of Spirituality and beyond.
It loomed out of the sands like a whale, and towered over her. There was a face in the middle of it.
She recognized the likeness of Nguyen Seth.
It smiled, feelers leaking from its black eyelids.
She remembered her father's favourite saying from Nietzsche. What does not kill me makes me stronger.
"Come on. Jib," she said. "Make me stronger."
Dr Proctor's knife shook, the point just under Hawk's chin.
Then, the world turned upside-down.
The Devil was pulled across the room, as the wineracks wrapped around him. Hawk was struck to his knees by a flying brick. He saw the stones of the ceiling shake loose. Ancient mortar fell as white dust.
Hawk choked, and held an arm up to ward off falling masonry. The whole monastery was going to come down on his head, thousands of tons of European stone.
Sand was blowing through in a throat-filling hurricane. Hawk covered his mouth. You could drown in this thick swirl.
He couldn't see Dr Proctor any more, but he could hear the man thrashing around, breaking the wineracks like matchwood. A carved Yosemite Sam hit him in the face. There was a lot of debris flying around, as if the cellar were the focus of a giant whirlwind.
The floor fell, like an aircraft hitting a pocket of turbulence, and Hawk plunged down with it, landing hard. He thought his ankle might be broken.
He knew this wasn't an earthquake.
A chunk of ceiling struck the flagstones, and burst like a stone frag grenade. Hawk heard Dr Proctor scream as the shrapnel hit him.
Hawk looked up, and saw light through the hole. Stones disappeared, pulled upwards, and sunlight, filtered through sand, streamed in. The whole of Santa de Nogueira was being pulled apart and tossed into the air. This was in the cellars. Hawk couldn't imagine what it would take to pick the structure apart piece by piece and still keep the chunks in the air.
Then he was seized by hands of wind, and tugged upright like a marionette. Pain lanced through his chest. He must have broken his ribs again.
The sand got into his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He shook his head, trying to fight the smothering blasts. There was nothing solid under his feet any more, and yet he was being drawn upwards.
Stones bounced off his head and shoulders as he rose through the storm. It was only a question of how soon he would be smashed against a lump large enough to do serious damage.
Through the sand, he could see Dr Proctor, also floating steadily upwards. The madman's limbs flailed, and he was screeching. To think that Hawk had feared Dr Proctor, had imagined that this pathetic puppet was the Devil.
They were well out of the cellars now. Hawk couldn't see any ground below, but thought it must be hundreds of feet beneath him. They were above the layer of the whirling stones. The skeleton of the monastery still stood, stripped of its bulk.
Hawk had flown in his spirit dreams, but this was the first time his physical form had been so elevated. In his dreams, he had walked the winds with the wendigo and the eagle ghosts. Now, he was helpless, a kite without strings, buffeted this way and that. Rising slowly, he had the sensation of falling from a great height, picking up speed as he shot towards the iron-hard ground.
Then, suddenly, he was above the sandcloud, floating in the still air. Dr Proctor broke the surface of the sandstorm at the same time, and the two men shouted to each other.
There was calm here, and a light breeze. The storm below was like a sea of agitated grit. Stones, wooden beams and gravemarkers were tossed on the surface of the clouds, being thrown up and sucked down. Krokodil was down there somewhere, swimming through the sand. The sky stretched away to a blue infinity, and the sun bore down on them.
In the gentle warmth, Hawk suddenly felt all the injuries he had sustained in his flight upwards. His face had been effectively sandblasted, and one of his legs hung useless.
He couldn't hear what Dr Proctor was shouting, but it didn't matter. Words were no good. All the songs Two-Dogs-Dying had taught his son were no good. There was no adequate response.
The thing that hung above the storm, its tendrils dangling into the sandclouds, was unquestionably a gitche manitou. Hawk couldn't bear to look at it, and yet he was unable to turn his head away. The Jibbenainosay was dark beyond darkness. Hawk supposed that a Black Hole must look like this, concentrated and yet immense. It was not a being Hawk could ever have shared a universe with.
It made the sky seem small.
It left the chapel alone, but tore up everything else in sight. Millions of tons of sand tossed around her, but she was in a bubble of empty air. The Jibbenainosay was cloaked in its storm now, but she could sense its bulk beyond the chaos. The entity was big enough to be infested with Godzillas the way a dog has ticks. For all its size, it appeared light, almost insubstantial. Krokodil knew it was from another place entirely, and she didn't mean Oz, Heaven or Akron, Ohio.
She saw its summoning in her mind. There was Elder Seth cutting himself open, surrounded by the bleeding dead. And there was the Jibbenainosay billowing inside a cathedral, squirming into the universe, the foul-smelling shit of some other reality.
Also, she knew that inside her was something that recognized the Dark One, that knew its secret names and the nature of its multiple existence. Something which, in another life, could even claim kinship with the Jibbenainosay. This was ihe thing that had helped her best Dr Proctor, had hauled her up to the Sixth Level, had made her Krokodil.
Whatever it was that possessed her, she hoped it would have the resources to fight this world-gobbling thing.
A tentacle shot out of the sand, and she brushed it aside. Its sweat stung.
She swung down from the perch, and dived into the sand. She expected to be engulfed, but her bubble travelled with her. Standing in front of the door to the chapel, she braced herself. The chapel must be the last of Santa de Nogueira. There were excavations in the earth where the storm had uprooted and scattered the monastery's subterranean cellars and passageways.
The bubble expanded, and she saw the ruin that was left where the courtyard had been. The flagstones were gone, and even the sand stripped away. The surface was uneven, strewn with detritus. A dome of sand-thick air curved over the area. Krokodil looked up, and saw the bodies sinking through the storm to the fragile bubble.
Several sets of legs dangled into the bubble, and were followed by man-shaped things. They were puppet-strung on tentacles, and twitched like galvanized frogs' legs.
Twelve corpses, dressed in bloodied black, touched down, and bobbed on their tentacles. They were all broken in various ways, but they were sprouting new organs from their rotten flesh. They were poison fungi, Krokodil knew, the stings of the Jibbenainosay.
The Dead Dozen stood in ranks, unsteady but mainly upright. Most of them didn't have faces any more, but those she could see were ordinary. They were dressed in the remains of outfits like the one she always saw Nguyen Seth wearing. One zombie, hunched over because of the tentacle stuck through his spine, even still retained his wide-brimmed pilgrim hat. These people had been Josephites, like Seth's fools from Spanish Fork. She knew more had been sacrificed for the benefit of the Elder's Great Mission.
She looked up at the boiling sand roof of the bubble. The face was there again, between the dangling tentacles.
"Freak you," she said, opening her optic. Her patch burned away, and the lase struck upwards, striking Seth's laughing face dead centre. It was broken apart, and a shower of sand fell into the bubble, dusting the zombies with muddy dandruff. Krokodil wiped her face off.
The nearest of the Dead Dozen made a grab for her, a bloated scorpion tail uncurling from its mouth. She twisted its neck with both hands, and the body fell lifeless. The disembodied head and its poison appendage still whipped around on its tentacle. The eyes popped on stalks. With an optic blast, she singed it to a skullcinder, and the tentacle was withdrawn in a whipping movement.
She unslung the machine pistol from its shoulder harness, and drew it out from beneath her padded jacket. It was old-fashioned and she doubted whether it would be much use against a Dark One, but there was still a Jazzbeaux part of her that took comfort in 20th-century deathware.
She gave the zombies a burst at chest height, and fleshflowers burst open where her slugs struck home. One or two were damaged beyond repair, and just hung useless, but the rest were still mobile enough to come for her. Her next spray was at head-height, and she gave a few lase jabs with her optic as well.
About half of the Dozen were out of commission. The rest were not recognizable even as former human beings. One scuttled towards her on its hands and the myriad crablegs that sprouted from its hips. Its Josephite hat bobbed as its head receded into the chest cavity. She emptied her clip into it, and it leaped like a Mexican jumping bean, green fluid splashing in spirals. It kept moving until she brought her booted foot down on its spine and pinned it to the ground. She swept with her lase, and severed the tentacle. The Josephite convulsed, and went limp, cockroaches bursting from its split mouths.
The remaining five corpses fell back into a close formation. She slipped a new clip into the pistol, and spattered them with fire. They still stood, linking arms, their tentacle strings twining together like the strands of a rope. They were growing together, forming a composite creature. Arms and legs reached out to steady the roughly spherical, multiply-headed beast. Its umbilical tentacle was thick and rough-skinned, like an elephant's trunk. Skins burst, and organic weapons poked through: stings, claws, mouths. A stiff tube spat pips at her. The tiny things exploded in the air, puffing sick-smelling smoke.
She held her breath and got out of the way. She put another burst of fire into the thing, and it swallowed the bullets with pleasure. Her lase blasts made smoking pinholes, but did no damage.
There were still human heads in the morass, and they were whispering to her.
The thing stumped towards her, agitated, and she danced back towards the chapel. She was always at the centre of the bubble, she noticed. She could not run into the storm and take her chances there.
The thing knew which way she would go, and kept pace with her. The Jibbenainosay was playing around, she realized. It could snip her head off with a single stroke, but it was prolonging the game.
A tightness was growing in her chest. Without knowing why, she opened her mouth and began to suck in air. Her lungs filled, but still she sucked. She inflated a little, but was able to take it. With the wind, she tasted power.
The thing stopped, and stood ten yards away from her, its appendages waving in the draught.
She sucked in more.
Stones came away from the chapel wall, a hundred feet away, and flew through the air.
Her inbreath continued.
She was Krokodil. The Ancient Adversary. She lived only to bring down the Dark Ones.
The thing was shaking now, pulled out of shape by the wind. Its tentacle was tangled, and the strands were parting.
Through her mouth and her nostrils, through the apertures of her eyesockets, through the pores of her skin, Krokodil drew in air…
The thing was struggling with itself. One of its components tore free and, manlike, made a dash for the edge of the Bubble. A pincer struck out, and sheared it in half.
Krokodil paused, and held the breath. There was a terrible quiet.
Then, she exhaled.
In the Tabernacle, Nguyen Seth was preaching. He eulogized the sacrifice of the Inner Circle, and vowed to his congregation that their deaths would not be in vain, that their bodies would be foundation stones for the greatness of Deseret. Choirs sang as he spoke, filling the vast space with heavenly music. He was eloquent. His words flew like birds.
Roger Duroc sat near the back, exhausted, not hearing the Elder's speech. His world had been transformed completely by the manifestation of the Jibbenainosay. He was sobered. Now, for the first time, he fully appreciated the vastness of the work upon which he was engaged. Nothing else mattered. Literally, nothing else in the entire history of the universe had ever mattered. His own life was less than nothing, and he was one of the handful of human beings who had anything at all to contribute to the Purpose.
Seth was enthusing the congregation. Tomorrow, when Krokodil was dead, he would select a new Inner Circle, and the process of initiation would begin. Duroc was impressed by the Elder's attention to petty details. A lesser immortal would have sunk to his knees in the presence of the Dark One and let everything else disappear from his mind, but Seth knew how important it was to retain his grip on the minutiae of the Great Work.
Duroc could not think of anything but the Jibbenainosay. When he closed his eyes, he saw the blackness of the thing. Behind tne beautiful harmonies of the Josephite Tabernacle Choir, he heard the Dark One's symphonic roar.
Elder Seth recounted the good deeds—manufactured especially for this service—of the martyrs, and listed their names among the saints. Above him, on the cross, a stone Jesus was forgotten. His tear-filled eyes averted from the preacher. This had nothing to do with Him, either.
Then, in the midst of his flight, Seth paused. He put out his hands to the lectern to steady himself, and shook his head.
He did not resume his speech.
Duroc was alerted, and looked up. He left his seat, and joined the throng pressing towards the Elder.
Nguyen Seth was shaking, in the throes of a grand mal seizure. Duroc had seen him like this before, when Krokodil bested Dr Proctor. But this was more serious.
Duroc realized that the finish of the battle being waged to the South would tell heavily on the Elder, whichever way it came out.
Seth staggered away from the altar. His jacket was open, and Duroc saw he was bleeding from the wound in his belly. Yellow tears crept from behind his dark glasses, and trickled down his white cheeks.
Duroc pushed his way through the Josephites. They fell back, reverentially. He knelt by the Elder, and hugged him.
Seth was trembling. Duroc held him fast.
He waved his hand. "Clear the Tabernacle," he whispered. His order was taken up, turned into a cry, "Clear the Tabernacle! Clear the Tabernacle! Clear the Tabernacle!"
The people flooded out, until they were alone.
Seth didn't speak. Duroc took his spectacles off, and saw the naked pain in his master's eyes.
Seth's hand found Duroc's arm, and grasped. His fingers fixed painfully into Duroc's flesh.
He was speaking now, an outrush of words in a dead language.
The battle continued…
The composite creature burst like a squashed puffball when Krokodil's blast hit it. Bodies peeled away from its mass, and were smashed into the sandstorm, where they were lost. The tentacle pulled it up off the ground, and its limbs kicked. There were shreds of bone and fleshmatter swirling around, and it was destroyed completely.
Krokodil yelled in her triumph, and seemed to expand inside herself. She was not just her tiny physical form, she was a vast jacket of energy. Her body was simply the core.
Her consciousness spread inside her extended sphere of power. She outgrew the bubble the Jibbenainosay had left her, and spread out through the storm.
The Dark One could not hide from the Ancient Adversary that way.
Hawk-That-Settles saw Dr Proctor drop into the storm, and felt unsteady. With nothing beneath his feet, it was hard to balance. Then, the sand came up for him, engulfing him completely. He did not know whether he was falling, shooting upwards or flying through the skies. But he was moving.
The Jibbenainosay raised another million tons of sand and held it in the air, thickening the atmosphere. The business with the human tools had been a feint, designed to dislodge the Pawn of the Nullifiers from the womanspeck, Krokodil. It had drawn out its Adversary now, and swelled in readiness for the serious fight.
As its passion built, continua were created and destroyed in the discharges of its energy. Dark thunderbolts struck all over the desert, blasting stretches of sand into polished glass darkmirrors the size of small cities.
Time stopped, then jerked backwards, then forwards again. The Jibbenainosay chewed at the fabric of reality, sucking in the Chaos from the Beyond, and spitting it out in phlegmy dollops.
Throughout Creation, the cacophonies were heard.
Dr Proctor had stopped struggling as soon as the impossibilities started. He accepted his fate as a cartoon character, and allowed the world to stretch like elastic around him. His head had exploded like a firecracker, but instantly reassembled. Anvils, safes and pianos plunged towards hapless citizens, but he was ascending like a hot air balloon.
He knew that, so long as he did not look down, he would never fall like the Coyote to the canyon floor miles below.
The Indian bobbed about, maybe twenty feet away. In Dr Proctor's mindsight, Hawk-That-Settles was three figures: a wiry, gaunt, nearly middle-aged Navaho in bloodied denims, covered in sand; a large bird of prey, wings outspread, talons pointed for a strike; and a tubby cartoon redskin with a big nose, a feather in his oiled black hair, warpaint on his cheeks, and fluffy moccasins on his feet.
In the storm, he heard the Warner Bromers' Orchestra race through a Spike Jones arrangement of "What Do They Do on a Rainy Night in Rio?" before doing a segue into "Tell the Doc to Stick to His Practice, Tell the Lawyer to Settle His Case, and Send the Indian Chief and His Tommy-Hawk Back to Little-Rain-In-My-Face."
The Tasmanian Devil howled for his dinner. He wanted Devilled Hare!
He leaped at the Indian, his legs kicking the air, his claws out. Stretched horizontal, he saw the boiling clouds of sand below, and felt the pull of gravity tugging at his face.
He was frozen for a second, and then the whoosh pulled him down. The sand hit him hard as he sank into it, and then he was plunging through the unknown darkness towards a rocky ground.
It would be all right. He might flatten like a pancake on impact, but he would pull himself together double-quick and bubble back to his original shape within a few beats.
Dr Ottokar Proctor fell…
Throughout the world, seismic instruments exploded at the same instant. Clocks stopped, or raced towards an unimaginable future. Millions subject to epileptic fits fell frothing, and hundreds of thousands of others, hitherto unaffected, joined them. It was as if a maxiscreamer the size of Saturn had been let off next to the planet.
Globally, a number of people equal to the population of the largest megapolis on the planet, died. Heart attacks, spontaneous human combustion, asphyxiation, a new species of instantaneous cancer, cerebral haemorrhage, suicides, massive discharges of bodily electricity, and simple shut-down were the major causes of death, but there was an increase of hostile activity in all the world's war zones, and an epidemic of murder that swept around from country to country like a contagious disease for weeks afterwards.
The computer records of a major corporation, located in a site under Nevada secure against nuclear holocaust, were wiped, precipitating an international money-market collapse that even rocked the solid foundations of the GenTech corporate empire.
Firestorms raged throughout the arctic tundra, and chunks of ice the size and shape of Silbury Hill poked through the sands of the Sahara Desert.
A ring of spy satellites recently put in place by a Gottschalk Geselleschaft in conjunction with the Soviet Union as an attempt to counterbalance GenTech's orbital superiority burned out at the cost of nine hundred billion ECUs. Every nation in the no-longer-terribly-exclusive Doomsday Club opened their silo doors and chained button-pushers to their consoles in readiness for an attack from the unknown.
A stretch of the Caribbean rose to the surface, bearing with it the wrecks of numberless ships and the ruins of a pre-human civilization, while a wave of water rippled across Louisiana, carrying away what little was left there. Solar flares jetted a million miles into space.
Beyond the galaxy, stars went spectacularly nova, snuffing out tens of thousands of life-bearing planets in a fireworks display whose light would not reach the earth for a billion years.
There was no one in the entire world, in the entire universe, who did not hear, feel or experience somehow the side-effects of the moment.
"Wilma, what was that?"
"Oh, honey, don't you bother. It was just another air crash out at Edwards. Why those wingboys bother, I don't know."
"Aw, Cheeze, I thought it was the Trump of freakin' Doom or somethin'. I near crapped my pants."
"Oh, honey, don't talk crude. You know Mama don't like it."
"Shaddup, and get me a brewsky, Wilma."
"Another beer?"
"Wilma…"
"'Kay, honey."
Hawk-That-Settles thought he was travelling horizontally until the ground loomed up like a wall, and he found himself stuck to it by gravity.
His head spun, and he knew which way was down again, thank the Lord. His ankle was still crushed, and he had other broken bones. But he was not spread out on the desert like a paste.
Sand was falling around him like rain, and he had to struggle not to be buried.
It was like trying to keep on the surface of a sea. He pushed himself upwards, letting the sand flood in below him, thrashing with his good leg and his arms.
Then, the rain was over. The winds were passing. Somewhere, Krokodil and the Jibbenainosay were wrestling, but Hawk was being left behind.
He rolled over, broken, and saw someone coming across the desert. At first, he thought it was Dr Proctor ready to finish him off. He almost wasn't sorry about that. Relieved, he pulled his shirt away from his throat. Being a good Indian was better than trying to stay alive and sane after today.
But it wasn't Dr Proctor. It was someone riding a horse.
Laughing painfully, he propped himself up on his elbows, and waved.
The horseman wore a battered stetson, and had his kerchief up over his face. Like his steed, he was thickly coated with desert dust. But he was reassuringly solid. The horse had a firm footing, and trod carefully across the sands. Hawk had a funny feeling about the horseman, as if he were seeing the earthly aspect of a manitou, or the spirit of a great warrior from the days of his ancestors.
"Stranger," he shouted. "Over here."
Rider and horse heard him at the same time, and both heads turned to look.
The horseman twisted his reins, and dug in his heels, spurring his animal to a gallop.
The stranger rode across the desert to Hawk, and the Indian felt safe again.
God was in his Heaven, it snowed in Indianapolis in the wintertime, the President of the United States was a good and honest man, you could get a free lunch, a buck could buy four quarters, the white man always honoured his treaties with the red, nobody got cancer, his father was hailed as a great chief, Jennifer White Dove kissed on a first date, a good Navaho could always hold his liquor, and…
"Friend," the horseman said, his voice rich and deep, "you look as if you could use a hand."
…and there was a Lone Ranger.
"Mr President, you are cleared for the red phone. The connection is being made…now."
"Boris, talk to me…"
"Our people tell us they're on DefCon 3, too. The missiles are not in the air."
"Boris, what the freak are you guys playing at?…What do you mean, 'what are you doing?' This has nothing to do with us, either…"
"He'll be in the bunker under the Kremlin, Mr President. Soviet chain of command has been established. If we struck at the Minsk switchboard intersection, we could gain perhaps five or ten minutes on our first strike."
"Boris, I've got scientists out my ass telling me the world is ending. We're the only guys big enough to do anything about it, except maybe one or two Japcorps, and the UEC, of course, and maybe a couple of Moslems, and…Hell, you know what I mean. I have to think you know what's going down, you know. What…? 'Going down?' It's an American expression, it means, like…uh, happening, I guess…"
"Is that a no, Mr President?"
"Yes, goddammit, Alex. I mean, yes that's a no…Boris, I'm sorry. I have someone shouting at me."
"The think tank suggest you act."
"Look, Boris, I'll put it this way. You stand down, and we'll stand down and maybe we'll get to go to the New Century party at the end of next year."
"Our sleepers in GenTech Tokyo just woke up, sir. They report that the corp are taking advantage of this window to sink a couple of Russkie ships in the Sea of Japan. We could go in with them…"
"Alex, shut up. Boris, look, we have some information that may be of use to you."
"Sir, we have a secret treaty with GenTech confirming our neutrality in any corporate war with the Soviet Union. You are bound by the terms of that agreement not to share the intelligence I have just given you with Premier Yeltsin."
"I'm the President, Alex, I can do any freaking thing I want to…Boris, look behind you. Off your Asian seacoast. This has nothing to do with us. We're sharing intelligence, here. We're helping you, now could you please just stand down and we'll stand down…Boris, you know I can't speak Russian."
"Mr President, I would like to tender my resignation."
"Shut the freak up, Alex!…Boris, have you got that? We're sending you charts on the satellite hook-up. The Sea of Japan. Get it to your navy."
"Sir, they've stepped back to DefCon 2."
"Boris, thank you, I love you! Boris? Boris? He's hung up! He can't hang up on me, the commie bastard!"
"Sir, we're still at DefCon 3. We could still hit Minsk. This way, we'd have twelve full minutes."
"I'm the President! He can't hang up on the President, can he?"
"Sir…"
"Oh, freak it, Alex, stand down. Get me a press aide. I need someone to write me a speech…"
Dr Proctor was the mouse. Above him, a giant-sized housecat was tangling with an equally huge bulldog.
He stumbled across the littered desert, trying to keep out from underfoot as the growling, snarling, miaowing monsters locked in their mutually destructive embrace.
Chase, catch and eat! That was the cycle of all life. Chase, catch and eat!
Dr Proctor would not be eaten today. He was too small a morsel.
"Holiness, we have the latest data from Mapache. I'm not sure, but there may be some help. Meanwhile, we have some reports from our man in Salt Lake City."
Pope Georgi studied the strip-prints. Cardinal Brandreth, the camerlengo, took them from him and studied them himself.
Outside, the square of St Peter's was full. People had just stopped what they were doing and flooded towards the Vatican. They knew something was happening, but weren't sure what.
The Pope considered. "We must send Sister Chantal to Arizona. Have her summoned."
Father O'Shaughnessy bowed, and kissed the Pope's ring.
Elder Seth was back in Jessamyn's childhood, her backstripes stinging. The nightmares poured in, as he clung to his disciple.
The focal point within his body, where the Jibbenainosay had lodged, was open again, and the Darkness was pressing at it. He was himself a gateway to the Outer Darkness.
In the beyond, the Dark Ones swarmed.
The Jibbenainosay reeled under the counterattack. The Ancient Adversary was turning its form against it. It realized how little it knew of the physical being of this universe. It had to concentrate, to pull its cloaking Darkness around its Cynosure. The Pawn of the Nullifiers had melded with the woman, and was its superior in terms of this universe. In the Outer Darkness, the Jibbenainosay would have dwarfed the Adversary, but here the match was disturbingly even. It funnelled its power into a vast tentacle, and thrust it through the Adversary's energy field, pumping the Darkness through…
On Monsters' Row, they were going wild. Voorhees had wrenched his door off, and was being held down by a dozen officers. Rex Tendenter hung naked from his bars like a monkey, chattering like a mad creature. Staig, Mizzi, McClean and Brosnan were howling like beasts. Etchison was laughing uncontrollably, plucking his eyelashes out one by one. Myers just stared at the walls of his cell, unperturbed by it all.
Voorhees got a cattleprod away from one of the officers, and shoved it through a uniformed chest. Hector Childress clapped as the blood sprayed, and called for more. Tendenter leaped to the floor. His bars had been bloodied. He licked the fast-drying red greedily, smearing his face. Colonel Reynard Pershing Fraylman lay on his military-perfect bunk, his tongue lolling, his face blackening. He had been struck dead early in the riot, brought down by a burst blood vessel. Herman Katz shouted in a womanish, high-pitched voice.
Voorhees had killed five of the guards, by now. Tear gas cannisters exploded and Staig swallowed his tongue, choking quickly to death. Three hefty officers in transpex riot gear jogged through the door, and levelled their guns. Rubber bullets bounced off Voorhees' broad chest, and spanged against the bars.
"Don't freak around," shouted a sergeant who was trying to hold his arm onto his shoulder, "kill the motherfreaker…"
Herman Katz cringed at the bad language.
The riot bulls levelled semi-automatics, and filled Voorhees's chest. The hulking moron kept stumbling onwards.
"Come on guys," shouted the sergeant, "plug the fat…" He was cut off by the next burst. Ricochet bullets slammed into him, and he relaxed, his arm slipping into his lap. Three other officers died in that volley, and Voorhees kept walking.
The riot bulls put ScumStoppers through Jason Voorhees's eyes, and the back of his bald head exploded.
"What a mess," said Herman. "This will never wash out, you know, never. This dress is ruined!"
They were still screaming. Tendenter dipped his fingers in Voorhees's spilled blood and brains, and raised the chunks to his eager lips.
"Freak," said Officer Kerr, "it's time we settled these bastards' hash once and for all."
He shot Tendenter between the eyes, and the Bachelor Boy slumped, still smiling, in his cell.
Childress realized what was happening, and ran to the back of his cell, hiding behind his bunk. Officers shoved their rifles through the bars and shot the chainsaw murderer through his bedding.
"Who's got the keys?" asked Kerr.
"No one."
"We do it through the bars then," said Kerr. "Sandall, you take Myers with the burpgun. He's the worst of them."
Sandall shoved his weapon through the bars, and looked into the empty eyes of the Haddonfield Horror. Even without a mask, his face was a blank. He flipped the safety catch, but the murderer moved too fast for him, and he found himself hugged to the iron. His head wouldn't fit through the gap, but Myers pulled it into the cell anyway, leaving ears, hair and chunks of flesh on the metal.
"Myers has got a gun. Take him."
The sirens stopped, and more officers arrived. Myers tossed the gun into the corridor, and sat down again.
"What's going on here?" asked Deputy Warden Crighton.
"The monst…the inmates attempted escape, sir."
"There'll be a full enquiry, Kerr."
"Yes, sir."
Crighton looked down Monsters' Row, at the corpses jumbled against the walls.
"Freak, what a mess! This is worse than the Tasmanian Devil's leftovers."
Rex Tendenter was buried in the asylum grounds while an overwhelmingly female crowd of over 300 piled lavish floral tributes against the walls of the institution. The widow of Officer Lyndon Sandall, who had been one of five mourners at his modest funeral a week earlier, threw a petrol bomb into the crowd. Sixteen died, forty-one sustained serious burns, and Clara Sandall moved into Sunnydales' Low Security Wing.
The home had kept Dr Proctor's "confinement area" empty for him, just in case he was ever recaptured. Nobody really wanted him back.
Meanwhile, Jason Voorhees's body disappeared from the morgue.
Krokodil felt the Jibbenainosay's arm pumping lethal filth into her spirit body. Concentrating, she reversed the flow, and sent the darkness rushing back through the tentacle into the body of the demon.
Physically, she was just standing there, the Jibbenainosay towering over her. But spiritually, she was containing the Dark One, spreading her power around the invader.
This must be the Seventh Level.
Dr Proctor thought he wanted to go home now. He wanted his books, and his cartoon videos, and his lawyers, psychiatrists and interviewers.
He turned away from the dog-and-cat fight, and walked into the desert. His home was out there, somewhere.
In the Surfside Pyramid, Gari the Guru raised his arms, and the Congregation joined in one long "ommm." The House of Worship was on the strip, within sight of the best surfing beach on the coast.
Gari told his tanned and even-teethed flock that it was okay to make money and still be spiritually healtily. He put them in touch with their selves, and purged them of any residual feelings of guilt they might have over their worldly success. He taught them to actualize their potential, and not to look out for the other guy. After all, in life there were winners and losers, and there weren't any Gods for losers.
In his audience were the heads of three Hollywood media conglomerates, four ostentatiously anonymous movie stars, a world-renowned porno stud who had recently turned devout, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who claimed to be second only to Dr Zarathustra in the field,
Sonny Pigg of the Mothers of Violence, Shirley MacLaine's personal astrologer, a gaggle of surfie chicks and dudes Gari could have sworn were runaway sexclones, the CEO of the LA GenTech subsidiary, the West Coast editor of Guns and Killing, ZeeBeeCee TV personality Lynne Cramer, author of best-selling roadway action fiction Derek Duck, bonsai tycoon Mike Miyagi, sonic sculptor Ritchie Bassett, the Deputy Governor of California, and the religious affairs correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, Harlan Ellison, who would be writing the Pyramid up in his Church of the Week column.
"Today, I want to rap with you about one of our former co-worshippers," Gari said, waving his crystal-tipped wand.
He pulled down the poster-size picture of Bronson Manolo. The Op was standing beside a surfboard, with a bikini babe, caught by the camera in mid-jiggle, on either side. His teeth shone, and his implanted chest hairs could have been painted on his sculptured pectorals. His ballsack swimming pouch made him look as modest as Michelangelo's David.
"When you look at Bronson Manolo, guys," the guru said, "I want you to see a loser!"
The Pyramid People hissed like Dracula confronted with a crucifix.
"Loser, loser, loser," they chanted. Some people threw things of little value: gold fountain pens, diamond earrings, last year's wristwatches. Gari would have them picked up later.
"Here was a cat who seemed to have it, but inside he was just a zeroid waster or else he would be here today."
They were shouting now, screaming their hatred at the outcast.
"Remember, guys, the beautiful never die!"
"Never die, never die, never die!"
Gari was happy. He had his people at the pitch he wanted them. The collection later would be his best yet.
"Winners never die," he shouted, "never die, never die, never die!"
He stopped shouting, and let the Pyramid People's adulation get to him. It hit him like a cocaine rush, but it was better than that. It gave him a thrill in his penis, and he knew he could convert this feeling into anything. Afterwards, he could have any of them, have all of them if he wanted. Promise people eternity, and there was nothing you couldn't get out of them. Nothing.
"Never die! Never die! Never die!"
Gari showed his teeth and extended his arms. His multicoloured robes caught the light.
From the back of the Pyramid, looking out through the clear-glass windows down to the beach, Gari the guru was the only one who saw the tidal wave coming.
"Never die, never die, never die," chanted the Pyramid People.
It was a pity Branson Manolo was dead. This was one wave he would have given anything to be on top of.
Raging against the Adversary, the Jibbenainosay dwindled, its matter being compressed in on itself. The process introduced it to the concept of agony. It felt the whole physical universe pressing against it, and yet knew there was no way back with honour into the Outer Darkness. The Ancient Adversary squeezed.
"This is Lola Stechkin, interrupting your scheduled broadcast to ask the question that's on everybody's lips this afternoon, October 8th, 1998. Just what the freak is happening? Later, we'll be going over to our weather bureau, our correspondents in Washington, Moscow, Tokyo and Rome, to our espers and to experts from the Universities of the world. And we'll be asking you to interface with your datanets to give us your suggestions. But first, here's a message from GenTech…"
…and squeezed…
"Musterr Banks, Musterr Banks, 'tis turruble, turruble, turruble. Wullie the Whale's alive, alive, alive. And the Bolivian ambassadurr's burruthdae partie's still on insaide hus stummuch! We're doomed, doomed!"
"Freak off, Jock, I'm counting money."
…and squeezed…
"Chantal, it's Father O'Shaughnessy…"
"Father, I'm pleased to hear from you. I've been working through those Glenzugge theorems, and I've had some thoughts."
"Papa Georgi wants to see you. It's important."
"I'll be there directly."*
*for more on Sister Chantal's mission, see Demon Download by Jack Yeovil.
…and squeezed…
Dr Proctor stumbled through the sand. He had lost one of his shoes, and was leaving bloody footprints.
He pushed on, the desert swallowing him.
…and squeezed…
Nguyen Seth convulsed, and his eyes shot open. "Roger, we've lost."
That couldn't be.
…and squeezed…
Hawk-That-Settles had been drifting in and out of consciousness. Now, he snapped awake. The horseman was gone, but his wounds were bound. He felt better. The storm had passed.
…and squeezed…
The Ancient Adversary held the collapsed mass of the Jibbenainosay in its aura, and felt the Dark One lose its grip on the universe. The wormhole opened up, and the Jibbenainosay was sucked back through it, its being unravelling as it jetted back up the funnel into the Outer Darkness. There, Ba'alberith, the Mythwrhyn and Nyarlathotep would be awaiting it, waiting to chastise it for its failure. Strengthened by its victory, the Ancient Adversary allowed itself to shrink, to recede, to spiral down.
Krokodil stood alone in the vast space of the desert. The remains of the monastery of Santa de Nogueira were a mile or so in the distance.
She was tired, but unhurt. The thing she had found in herself, and let loose, was coiled safe in her chest again.
At her feet was a lump of crystal, clear but shot through with threads of red. She picked it up, and was transported…
…she floated in the midst of an eternal Darkness, sensing titanic presences, witnessing their eternal struggles. Aeons passed, and the course of the battle swept across the expanse of the Multiple Creation and back, but nothing really changed. The Dark Ones and the Nullifiers still struggled, but there was no victory, nor did either side truly desire the destruction of the other…
…she dropped the crystal, and it sank into the sands.
That was not an experience she wanted to repeat in a hurry.
"No," Seth said, "we haven't lost. Yet. The Dark Ones are angry, but their wrath is for one of their number. We are excused. The Great Work still goes on. Roger, we must prepare to summon a demon. Quickly. You must nurture this one with your blood. We must strike."
Seth stood up, and straightened his mirrorshades. Inside, he could still hear the tick-tock of the crocodile.
He raised the knuckle of his right forefinger to his mouth, and bit. The finger came off and fell away. A feeble spurt of blood splashed on the table, and he drew a sign of protection with it.
He sucked the stump. The finger would grow back soon.
Hawk-That-Setties sat up, and sang his song of life. He felt no triumph, for he had not truly overcome anything. But he was alive, when he had had no chance of survival. From now on, his life was blessed, the gift of the manitou. He must be careful with it.
Krokodil heard him and walked across the sand to find him.
Note: for further adventures of Krokodil, Hawk-That-Settles and others see Comeback Tour by Jack Yeovil.