The Light is the Darkness (14 page)

Conrad was growing cold as the sweat dried and his senses found equilibrium. “Worse. What does worse mean?”

“Drake may be the wart on the ass of an extremely large toad. Surely you figured out he’s not unique.”

“Not unique?”

“He’s junior member of a peer group, the elite of the elite.” Singh lighted a cigarette. He sighed. “The Order of Imago. You’ve probably heard of it during your investigations. It’s one of those loudly whispered secrets—like the Masons and the Satanists, only more so. Powerful, powerful men. Tycoons, industrialists, Old World nobility. A wicked old-boys secret handshake society. We know it exists. We’ve met a member or two, heard some stories. They’ve established a few communes in remote areas. There’s one in Arizona and another in Southern California. Probably five or six others. Didn’t Imogene tell you?”

“Nothing specific. Wild talk.”

The men stared at him. Their faces were luminous as wax. Mummies. The liquid giggle floated from the bedroom and Marsh’s glance twitched that direction. His tongue distended slightly. He sported the lump of a burgeoning erection.

Singh said, “Why did you lie to us about your sister? You should’ve told us from the start who she was after.”

“What, and ruin a beautiful relationship.”

“Perhaps it’s our fault. We should’ve dug a bit deeper, should’ve understood this wasn’t just about Imogene. It all goes back to your father. He owed Drake everything, didn’t he?”

“I’ve always liked you, man. So, I guess I’m kinda sorry about this.” Marsh began to tremor. He looked like a man in the throes of palsy.

Conrad picked up his glass and filled it again. He noticed Marsh had reached into his Bermuda shorts, was stroking himself. “What does this group want? Aren’t you two even a teensy bit curious?”

“Dunno, bud. Cults aren’t my forte. I’m just giving you the Action News headlines…” Marsh’s eyes went dead and his face softened, lost animation. “Sorry, Singh. I’m done here.”

“Rob —”

Marsh wheeled and shuffled to the white door. He hesitated, shoulders heaving, before he shoved open a dark slot and bulled through. No music, no giggling, nothing. Vacuum sucked the door shut.

Singh said dreamily, “Bugger it all.” He wagged his head as if it weighed upon his neck. “Did you follow that trial of a certain naughty senator. Four or five years ago? The one they say raped the intern? I had the dubious pleasure of interviewing that sterling fellow. He’d made an exceedingly strange request during his interrogation. He demanded to speak with an intelligence operative, someone involved with national security. So, in I went. The senator mentioned Ambrose Drake as a benefactor. The senator is from the oldest money, colonial bluebloods in tall hats. Kind of guys who presided over the witch trials. He made this crazy claim his ancestors knew Drake personally.”

The floor lamp began to flicker rapidly.

Something fell. Two, three, four beats and the lamplight steadied. An ashtray had plunged to the floor, dumped its contents; the brazier rocked gently on its base. The red and blue doors hung open, revealing cavities.

“Singh. What’s happening?” Conrad had fallen into a half crouch, fingers spread in anticipation of violence. His terror was muted, muffled, as if this were a dream and the floor was quicksand and it was happening to someone else, someone on TV, perhaps, an actor rehearsing his wooden lines, standing on the X.

“You know.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”

Singh’s eyes were huge and dewy. Saliva gathered in the corner of his slack mouth. “Vonda is lonely.” He shuddered and removed his gaze from the white door. “So this hapless senator, the one with his neck on the block, swore that Dr. Drake was involved in, how shall I say, extreme occult practices. Decidedly anti-American practices. The senator claimed to have made a pact with Drake and friends in return for his celebrity status and all the fruits that accompanied such success. I relayed this story to my superior…expecting to get a laugh. Nobody was laughing. My boss quietly advised me forget what I’d been told. And I did.”

A pact.

Imogene had said it first, shouted it at him. The truth was heavy and it squirmed in Conrad’s mind.
Barbs. God will eat us all
.

Sudden vertigo and the squeak of neglected hinges interrupted Conrad’s train of thought. The white door had swung slightly ajar; the pitch blackness inside had grown solid and swollen and sprung its cage.

The room rippled at the periphery, distorted and elongated precisely as it might’ve if Conrad had eaten a massive dose of shrooms or suffered a nasty concussion. Pressure built upon his flesh and in his bones. Objects on the counter rustled; the laptop slid several inches. The room seemed to be listing by a few degrees, a cabin in a sinking ocean liner.

“Farewell, Conrad,” Singh said. “It occurred to me we owed you a parting gift, a token of our esteem as it were.” He took a small packet from inside his coat and handed it to Conrad. “I don’t recommend viewing these on a full stomach. Nonetheless, these disks contain all you’d ever care to know regarding the proclivities of Dr. Drake. Some in color.”

“Come here.” A female voice; a soft, sweet invitation that hinted of mysterious pleasure, of chocolate and peppermint, clamps and whips, a long, slow descent into the ultimate darkness of a sundew. “Come here, come here.”

The lamp dulled, dulled and reddened as a beam seeping through closed fingers. Marsh called, “Tell him goodbye, Leo. I need to show you something.”

Singh smiled beatifically. His shadowy face gleamed. “Goodbye, Conrad. See you soon.”

Conrad didn’t answer. He blundered out into the hallway and fled, following the swaying overhead lights. Someone kept calling his name.

Interlude

The first knockdown fight Conrad had was as a teenager and with his father.

Dad was a scary man. Big body, big brain, murderous temper. A scary man and a terrifying drunk. He was drunk most of the years Conrad knew him and the two seldom spoke. Dad took him aside after Mom crashed her plane and had a father-son type of chat in the cellar of their home in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains where they’d dwelt since Ezra’s death. The cellar was much larger than it appeared and housed a number of machines and assorted lab equipment. Dad spent the majority of his waking hours down there, experimenting, plotting, muttering and cackling to the rats and the spiders. Conrad would’ve rather had the conversation in the traditional venue—on a rowboat in the lake, fixing the junk farm truck, chopping wood, anything but the damned cellar. Unfortunately, the old man had become exquisitely paranoid in his dotage and didn’t like to hang around in the open lest somebody should take a shot at him, or swoop down and roll him in a carpet and rendition him to some middle eastern hellhole for questioning.

Dad popped the cork on a bottle of Bushmill’s and guzzled it, one bloodshot jaundiced eye fixed upon his son all the while. He set the bottle aside and wiped his mouth and said,
You like to fight, Connie?

This surprised Conrad. He’d never been in trouble at school, never thrown a punch. Most of the kids liked him. Those that didn’t wanted to screw Imogene in the worst way and left her brother in peace for obvious reasons. The bruisers who didn’t want to fuck her were scared shitless of her. She’d socked one guy who got too fresh in the testicles with the cute little set of brass knuckles she hid in her purse. Those guys left Conrad alone too. On the rare occasion some fool decided to jump him, nothing exciting came of it. Conrad could absorb a golf club blow to the head and shake it off, just stand there and take a beating until the bully got too tired to swing. That scared people worse than Imogene’s brass knuckles and pointy shoes. Which, after messing with Conrad, they experienced close up anyway.

Conrad shrugged. He seldom spoke around Dad, except in shrugs and grunts, and monosyllables.

Dad said,
You’re a special case. Some of my friends in the military would be most eager to get you in their clutches. Ever ponder a career in the Marines? See the world with the Navy? No? Glad to hear it, because I won’t allow it. Your mom would haunt me if I did.
And he glanced around as if Mom lurked in the shadows, ready to pounce.
Anyway, Connie. You’re special and life is going to become extremely interesting for you in the Chinese curse sense of the word. This family has always been afflicted with that kind of thing. It goes back to my ancestors and I’m sorry your mom and you kids got roped into the mess. The thing is, I’m sending you to live with a friend of mine in the Mediterranean. He’s got all kinds of connections. You’ll finish school and go on from there.

What about Genie?
Conrad actually looked from his feet and into his father’s eyes.

She’s going to live with Auntie. I have high hopes for that girl.

Don’t separate us. I’ll stay with Auntie too.
Conrad began to fidget mightily. Sweat ran down his neck.

Dad chuckled.
First, you make Auntie nervous. Second, you and Genie are entirely too close. That’s what comes of letting Mother practice all that fucking New Age child rearing bullshit on you two—way too much confusion. Not your fault, but all the same, it’s best you kids see other people for a while.

Where is she?

Gone, man, gone. They’ll be on the road a while. Out of the country.

Conrad didn’t say anything. He nodded and tore an x-ray machine free of its mooring bolts and broadsided Dad, sent him crashing through a domino row of shelves. He didn’t use his empty hand because he was enraged, not suicidal. A fire started and Dad came out of the smoke, laughing and swearing, ready for murder.

They destroyed the cellar and then the fight moved upstairs into the main floor of the house and they destroyed that too. Dad lifted the the big stainless steel refrigerator and rammed Conrad, bulldozed the whole living room wall, and then they were in the yard, ripping apart the lawn, tearing up lawn sprinklers and whacking each other with them.

Conrad thanked god Dad was dead drunk, because it slowed the old man down a little. He threw some dirt in Dad’s eyes and while he yelled and blindly pawed the air, Conrad managed to tear the Citroen’s passenger door off its hinges. He raised the door overhead and slammed it down across Dad’s back. It took three tries, but eventually Dad stopped trying to get on his feet, and lay there, muttering. Dad eventually crawled over to the car and got a half-full bottle of scotch off the floorboard.

The two of them slumped on the ruined grass and drained the bottle and watched the house explode in a Hollywood-style ball of fire. Dad wiped a tear from his cheek and explained that Conrad was a special case because he’d been engineered via a cloning process and that his DNA didn’t derive solely from his loving parents, but there was other source material. Material of a basic, primitive stock, an atavistic stock. That was why he looked a tad more brutish than the other lads, and why he could wrench car doors off their hinges, and why he could probably regenerate a non-lethal gunshot wound to soft tissue in a few hours. Maybe they could test that hypothesis one day…

That was also the first time Conrad got drunk. It became a trend. Turned out Dad was right about the gunshot wounds, too.

Chapter Four

I

DeKoon’s men swooped in and plucked Conrad off the street as he limped out of a tavern in the industrial district a few minutes after last call. He saw them coming, decided that discretion was the valorous course, and went along for the ride in a big black limo.

DeKoon sat across the way, immaculate in his white suit and hat. A heavily painted girl in a see-through blouse cuddled him, her hand inside his jacket and circling. She wore peacock feathers in her tightly coiled dark hair and silver eye shadow. A man sat on either side of Conrad. They too wore nice suits and hats, black ones, and sunglasses. Another guy rode up front with the driver and at least two cars followed the limo.

“You appear remarkably improved since our last encounter,” DeKoon said. “Still, only three weeks until the ludus. Not long to prepare for what I assure you shall be a nightmare. The Greek is hell on wheels. And, of course, he’s bringing some associates and pets. A pity for you.”

“Three weeks is an eternity,” Conrad said.

“Yes. You’re a special case. I said the same to Uncle K many, many times. We’ve made a small fortune on people underestimating you. You have the most remarkable endurance and fortitude I’ve ever witnessed. The ghost of Rasputin inhabits your skin.”

“Rasputin had nothing on me. I am going to slaughter the Greek, and his pets, and his associates.”

“I almost believe you.”

Conrad closed his eyes and tilted his head back so the blood and mucus drained from his sinuses down the back of his throat. DeKoon was correct, though—he felt far better than he had any right to. He said, “Uncle didn’t have any heirs. He left you the empire?”

“Let us say I’m the executor. I represent the spirit of his interests. Your incessant meddling with the greater powers that be alarms me and conflicts with said interests. It has to stop.”

“Been talking with my spook buddies.”