Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (23 page)

As the sun swelled, it came clear to Howell. A towering, brazen idol, taller than the highest weathervane on any of the mansions it shouldered aside as it rolled down the street on gigantic iron-shod wheels.

A huge, saturnine head and torso, with great hands outstretched to lift its worshippers to its grinding mechanical jaws. The whole idol glowed dull red with the heat of the furnace raging inside it. All that it touched crumpled in white flames, but the hordes of freaks crowded closer, herded by cage-headed alienists armed with baling hooks and pikes.

The horde tortured itself, each tearing at the deformities of his or her neighbor as the heat between them came alive with white light and fire. Packed closer and closer together as the advancing idol trapped them in the cul-de-sac, they approached an ecstasy of panic, yet they meekly stepped or knelt, singly and in knots of writhing bodies, onto the spreading bronze palms of the glowing idol.

Howell knew this was the thing from which he had averted his eyes, the last time he got lost in Atwater. When she said, “He’s coming,” she meant this. Now, it was too late to escape. The horde danced on his trapped car. He could go through the mansion, dive out a window on the other side and run all the way home, if he had to, but he got no further than the parlor, where the woman’s ordeal was, for better or worse, nearly over.

The woman who raped him told him the thing inside her was his. He could come no closer than the hole he’d made in the wall, but he could not run away from it. Her legs jerked and wrenched impossibly akimbo, laying bare her outraged genitalia, and a glimpse of something fighting its way out of her.

No one had ever asked for what she took from him. No one had ever wanted anything from him but his facility as a calculator, and so the violence with which she had taken his seed had left him curiously stronger than he’d been, before. He’d never realized how much he feared human contact, and he saw in her slitted eyes, now, how much like him she was, how loathsome the act had been for her, but how desperately necessary.

That the act had produced some offspring, here in this place that was insanity itself, was the only sane thing Howell could find to cling to.

He went to her and took her hand. He tried to soothe her with words and touch, but she seemed beyond noticing. “If you’re going to be the mother of my child,” he said, “I think you could at least tell me your name.”

Her eyes rolled but focused on him, and in the midst of her panting seizure, she found breath to laugh at him. “Your
child
? Oh, Howell, you idiot—”

A wash of scalding heat raised blisters on his face, and the mansion’s outer wall melted away like a tortilla under a blowtorch. Outside, all he could see was a single red eye, glowering cruel and absolute with the fires of a collapsing sun behind it, a brain that blasted all it touched to atoms. It looked full on them now, as, all at once, the woman gave birth.

Her hand clasped his and the mountain of her belly tore open like a water-balloon smashing into a wall.

Ferns curled and turned to silver tornadoes of ash. Swamps of sweat vaporized out of the sheets. The woman’s hand went slack and deflated in his grip, crumbled like a sheaf of autumn leaves. Howell’s own clothes smoldered and gave off puffs of steam and smoke, but he noticed none of it.

The thing that squatted in the ruined chrysalis of the woman at first looked like nothing more than her insides come to life: bones, muscles, guts and all, stirred and resculpted into a crude effigy of a newborn child, but it redefined itself as he watched. Swaddled in blood and shreds of uterine lining, the thing uncoiled and opened its eyes. Swollen sacs of tissue burst and unfurled into membranous wings, and Howell understood.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice piping and unsteady in its new vessel, “for helping me escape. I’m sorry you won’t.”

The iridescent wings snapped and beat the stagnant air, shaking off slime and lifting the newborn body out of its cocoon in one swift motion. Howell ducked, then made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but she eluded him and dove out the window, into the eye of the idol.

And then the whole house was flying sideways, and Howell had no choice but to go with it. The chiming, roaring explosion went on forever, the room rolling end over end and dancing wheels of fire all around him. And when it all stopped, he was too broken to move, but somehow, he was outside.

The brazen idol clawed at the sky, at a fleeting dart of light that was well away from its glowing grip, and the idol seemed to rust and come unhinged inside, all its parts simply disconnected from the others and the furnace, unleashed, spilled out waves of fire upon the hordes.

Howell ran and ran and still the sound of the fire rolling, gaining, eating up the land, grew in his ears, but he kept running, in his mind calculating his speed and caloric consumption and estimated time of arrival if he just ran and ran home, if he ran to Mexico, if he just ran around the world and came back to this exact point—

Somewhere, long before he got home, he dropped in his tracks and fainted, mind and body completely spent.

And he woke up in a ditch beside the 99 just outside the town of Chowchilla, a sheriff’s deputy in an orange poncho poking him in the ribs with a flashlight.

He held his life together pretty well, after that, all told, and most of the time, he didn’t remember his dreams.

He worked from home, toting up accounts for several small, borderline illegal companies. He did not, could not, go outside. The fear that he would get lost again, that he might lose track of the route down the street to the corner store, kept him inside. In every corner of every place he did not know as intimately as his own body, a doorway to Atwater waited.

And yet he kept working, eating and sleeping, because, though he did not admit it even to himself while he was awake, he hoped for something.

He lurched on through life like this for months before the dreams started to push through into work, into the blank spaces on the screen and the black pauses between commercials on TV. Her face, her luminous blue wings lifting her out of the fire and into the sky. He still lived, he began to see, only because he hoped she would come back.

He began to seek out some sign, some message to affirm that she was not just a dream, but nothing came forth to save him. He looked for other Atwaters and found one, in Minnesota—”a small, friendly community which welcomes people with open arm,” said the website of the town “named for Dr. E. D. Atwater, of the land department of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad”—but nothing to distinguish it or marry it to the others, except its name. He did searches, found hundreds of people, streets and companies named Atwater, but nothing that resonated… until he found a listing in a San Diego phone book, and did a search on the computer.

Atwater Transpersonal Institute
. The website gave a breezy outline of treatments, but Howell didn’t read them. He looked only at the picture on the home page, of a row of couches with people lying on them, sleeping peacefully with spider webs of electrodes pasted to their skulls. He studied the woman on the nearest couch, the planed bones of her face, the black wings of hair flared out on the pastel pillow, and he got his car keys.

At the end of a quiet residential street, on the peak of a hill overlooking Presidio Park with its Spanish colonial fortress, the Atwater Institute looked like the first outpost of yet another colonization. A low, faux-adobe building honeycombed with courtyards huddled around a conical tower of tile and glass. It hid itself from the street behind white brick walls and eucalyptus trees, but the gates readily swung open when Howell pressed the button at the unmanned security checkpoint. He drove up the cobblestone path to the front doors, where a nurse waited. He wanted to turn around and go back home, but he forced himself to get out and walk up to her. “I think I know a woman who is being treated here. I’d like to see her, please.”

The nurse only stared, backed away and went inside, leaving the door hanging open. He followed, pausing helplessly as a valet slipped into his car and whisked it off to an underground garage.

Inside, the atrium was dimly lit by a soothing cobalt light. Banks of ferns in hanging pots softened the outlines of the room, and a soft, almost inaudible music played somewhere, an atonal carillon stirred by alien wind.

Howell wanted out, needed in. She’s here, somewhere, it’s all here, it wasn’t in your mind,
oh God, it was all real—

“I’ll just get Dr. Atwater,” the nurse said, and fled the room. Howell looked at abstract pictures on the walls, at a watercolor of a man with a beehive for a head, at another of a puppeteer being strangled by marionettes with their own wires, which sprouted out of his flesh.

“Art therapy,” said a voice over his shoulder. “It’s not pleasant to look at, but it makes them healthier.”

“What else do they do?” Howell turned and looked at the Doctor’s feet. He could not look at his face, but he heard the man’s reaction.

“I—my God, what’re you doing out here?” asked Dr. Atwater.

“You treat people with sleep therapy here, right?”

“That’s correct. Maybe you—”

“I have been having bad dreams for a long time, Doctor. About this place.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe if I could show you…” Dr. Atwater beckoned him through a door into an even darker corridor. Howell followed, looking around him. The music was louder back here, liquid chimes that made him feel sleepy.

“Binaural tones guide the treatment,” Atwater said. “Shamanic cultures use them in rituals, in drumming and trance-inducing states to guide the shaman into the realm of the spirit. It’s subtler than medication, and it doesn’t blunt the subconscious input from the limbic system. It lets lucid dreams become the patient’s reality.”

“For how long?”

“In my papers, I recommended regimens of three-day sessions over several months, but the modalities promised so much more for extreme cases, if we could only push deeper, longer. But you know all this.”

Howell stopped avoiding the doctor’s eyes. Against the tanning bed bronze skin, they were cold, faded gray. “Where is the woman? The one in the picture?”

Atwater opened a door, waved Howell closer. A body lay on the couch that filled the tiny cell. Howell leapt at it, but froze. It wasn’t her.

The honeycombed man twitched and shivered on the couch. He wore mittens and restraints, but still his face was red and chafed, all facial hair plucked out from compulsive grooming.

“One of our most challenging cases. He suffers from a massive OCD complex, but in his therapy, he externalizes his disorder, manifesting it in terms he can metaphorically abolish. He’s been dreaming for a month on, a week off for two years, and he’s getting better.”

Blinking, seeing the bees like ravens on the patient’s face, Howell muttered, “No, he’s not.” Then, rounding on the Doctor, he demanded, “Where is she?”

Atwater’s eyes flatly regarded him, but he saw the lambent red glow kindling in them. His mouth made a bold pretense of smiling openness, but his brow was forked with wrathful wrinkles, and his rusty red beard formed a mask of flames. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who are you looking for?”

“You know, don’t you lie!” Howell flinched at his own voice, but he took hold of the Doctor’s arms and pushed him back against the wall. “You were there! You tried to eat her up like all the others, but she got away from you!”

Atwater’s eyes flashed, his jaw dropped. “So, you found a back door into the group… Well, that’s a mystery solved, at any rate.”

As if done with Howell, he made to turn away and go about his business, but Howell slammed him into the wall. “Where is she?”

Atwater sighed. “Gone. Transferred to a private institution. Her parents might not sue. They’re very wealthy, powerful people, and they were very upset when their neurotic, drug-addicted daughter came to us to be cured and emerged a full-blown autistic.”

“Your dream therapy wrecked her brain.”

“No, my friend,
you
did. She got it from you.” Atwater opened another door onto darkness. “Here, I’ll show you.”