The Light is the Darkness (3 page)

Oh my. Clubs and knives, oh, oh—and tridents?

And whips and nets. I crash chariots; the ones with spiked hubs like Kirk Douglas drove. Circus Maximus, sis.

Lucky you. You guys prance around in costumes like Mexican wrestlers, except you try to murder or maim each other.

Yeah.

Who pays for this spectacle? Ever really ponder that one, Connie? Ever think about what sort of people arrange this secret world you star in?

Rich folks.

Guess they’d have to be to recreate Caesar’s favorite pastime. That really your kind of crowd? These effete psychos who want to relive the seedier aspects of the Roman empire?

These are the kind of folks who own tropical islands. Hell, some of them run banana republics for fun. They want a spectacle, I can fill the bill.

Ah yes. Dictators, inbred nobility and other megalomaniacs. Swell friends you got there.

It’s a living.

Over steak and wine, she played with her knife, which was an unsettling bookend to her smile, and said Ezzy didn’t die of cancer. Ezzy was murdered. Drake murdered him, murdered a bunch of people, probably. Why? Because Drake was a devil. Quite possibly, the good doctor was Old Poger himself, horns and tail.

Conrad was unsure how to assimilate this new information. Seeing Sissy was cool, but he had a lot on his plate, what with the strict schedule of arena events and the jet-setting debaucheries accorded a celebrity of his stature; command performances. He nodded and composed a semi-credulous reply that didn’t fool either of them.

Imogene was always the smart one of the kids. When it came to Conrad she was practically telepathic.
Fuck it. Forget I said anything. How’s your goddamn steak tare tare? You eat like an animal. Dress you in some skins, you’d fit right into a cave man exhibit. Fucking troglodyte.

Genie—

Fuck it, I said. Got any toot? You rich bitches have snow falling out of your pockets, don’t you?

Sure. I know a guy, fix us right up.

Conrad lost his appetite. Not much later, he lost his sister too…

III

M
r. Navarro?
”

And the dream ended like a soap bubble bursting.

Light—too much, too red—came through the water; then the wavering oval of an elongated face, a blotch of tapestry, the pulsing glow of a slide projector. He sat upright in the great marble tub and gasped. Water streamed from his face and goggles. The goggles had ceased transmitting, but their after-images crackled behind his eyelids, asynchronous to the rapidly shuttering patterns on the white-lit square of wall.

Dr. Enn rose from the table with the complicated recording equipment and brought him a towel and gently retrieved the goggles. Dr. Enn returned to his table, careful not to trip over the loops of wires and plastic cords. Agents Marsh and Singh lounged across the room, sipping scotch from glasses, the bottle on a small table between them.

The temperature in the room was a balmy eighty degrees, and yet Conrad shivered and his hands were blue. He wiped his face and staggered from the tub to a patio chair and pulled on his flip flops. Conrad was not a tall man, but immense through shoulders and hips, and his legs were grotesquely thick such that he walked with an odd, shuffling gait. His skin was burned and dark and terribly scarred as if a shark had taken bites out of him then dragged him face down across the coral. He said, “Time.” His was a rusty voice, a drinker’s voice, the voice of a man who’d survived a hanging.

Dr. Enn consulted his watch. He was much lovelier and infinitely fragile compared to his subject. His hair was tight and black and he might’ve been a runway model. His pretty face bore the elastic expression of a man knuckling under to sea-sickness; sweat oozed from him. He said, “Seventeen minutes, forty-three seconds. I’m impressed…although it’s hardly a record.”

“How is Esogi? Bangkok, right?” Dr. Esogi was Dr. Enn’s colleague at the institute researching Conrad’s ‘compellingly bizarre’ physiological and neurological activity.

“There’s a symposium. Very prestigious.”

“Old Burt’s golfing and whoring it up between panels, I bet.”

“Yes—I was hoping to accompany him.” Enn managed a smile.

Conrad laughed and found his cigarettes and matches on the coffee table and lighted one. He studied Enn as Enn’s face gathered the unwholesome light from the projection beam. “Are you ok, Doc?”

“Oh, ha-ha, don’t mind me.” Worms crawled across Enn’s cheek. A butterfly sloughed its chrysalis and fluttered against his forehead. The sun was a black disc rising from his left eye. “Do you mind if I kill this—?”

“Please.” Conrad gestured indulgently. His hands had steadied, his pulse rate begun to drop into the high-normal range.

Dr. Enn shuddered and clicked off the projector and the room was flush with soft blues and blacks. After a significant pause, he said, “Dr. Esogi mentioned your unorthodox modalities, but I must confess...” He referred, of course, to the dull gray tube on the table, its tightly rolled sheets of waterproof paper with their diagrams and formulas; micro-slides of photography that ranged from disquieting to monstrous, and the monstrously incomprehensible. “We’ll resume the battery when you’ve rested.”

“Thanks, doc. This’ll be the last session for a while, so be thorough.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Sorry, doc. My public demands an appearance.”

“I think I’ll detour to the bar and have a drink. Gentlemen.” Dr. Enn nodded to the agents, grabbed his coat and left in a reasonably dignified hurry.

“The fuck is this operation you got going?” Marsh said. “I told you, Leo, we dig through a few phone records, make a few calls, follow that fruity little doc around, we find out where our boy disappears to.”

“Yes, what is this operation?” Singh nodded at the machinery, the tangle of leads.

“Sensory stim,” Conrad said without a hint of irony. “Big match coming up in a few weeks. I use all kinds of techniques to get my head in the game. Hypnotherapy, regression. Whatever.”

“But…if that little fellow is correct, you just held your breath for over fifteen minutes. That isn’t humanly possible.”

Marsh said, “Where did you get that collage?” He was still staring at the projector and what had beamed from its eye. “That’s vintage Cold War eyes-only shit. Some kind of mind-conditioning protocol. What the hell you want with a military grade brainwashing protocol.”

“I don’t want it. Imogene left it behind.”

“Doesn’t explain why you’re enacting the procedure. This isn’t the kind of shit you play with, Connie.”

“Trying to get into my sister’s head,” Conrad said. As always he told most of the truth. It was the only way to stay half a step ahead of the bastards. You told ninety-nine percent of the truth and saved the lies for emergencies. “She’s after something, I don’t know what. Maybe she’s trying to shed some light on a moldy old government conspiracy. Maybe she wants to prove my dad was locked away because he knew too much. She didn’t bother to tell me.”

“We’ll be taking these materials off your hands,” Singh said.

Conrad smiled. “Easy come, easy go. She found them lying around somewhere.”
Somewhere
included abandoned bunkers and secret stashes and lost government installations around the world, a few decommissioned black ops facilities. “The stuff you’re looking at belongs to a file under MK Ultra. Way before we were born to this veil of tears. Project TALLHAT, I think.” He waited for a flicker of recognition, of fear or surprise, but the agents just stared like fish. “And on the subject of Genie—”

“Haven’t heard anything since the South America rumor,” Marsh said. “Which, as you discovered, was a wild goose chase.”

“She’s dead, Jim,” Singh said and gazed sadly into his empty glass.

“Dead or burrowed in like a tick,” Marsh said. He refilled both their glasses. The men sipped and kept staring at Conrad with those fish-eyed expressions. “We can’t figure out what she was up to.”

“We haven’t quite decided what
you’re
up to.” Singh lighted a cigarette.

“Me? Fighting. Looking for my sister. She was obsessed with finding some guys. Cold War guys. Guys associated with this TALLHAT program. I need another name. Maybe two. Figure you boys can help me. These papers gotta be hooked into a database somewhere.”

“No shit,” Marsh said. “Want us digging up bones in an the Old Spooks Graveyard? Could be dangerous. Gonna be costly, for sure.”

“How do you plan to compensate us?” Singh breathed smoke. “Planning to sell a house? One of your bolt holes? Is that wise? You seem to worry about death from above more than anybody I’ve met.”

“I worry about death from every direction. There’s a payday coming. What do you say?”

“Yeah? Who are you up against?” Marsh appeared intrigued.

“The Greek.”

“He’s the number three contender,” Singh said. “I’m impressed.”

“They must be betting on him to murder you,” Marsh said. He glanced at the ashtray full of cigarette butts and smirked. “The Greek carves you then gets his own shot at the title. You’re a tune up match.”

“Something like that. He won’t carve me, though. He’s a grappler. He’ll pull off my arms.” Conrad smiled and lighted another cigarette. He’d watched several dozen videos of the Greek, a hulking brute who favored exotic helms of savage beasts. The Greek had once snatched a full grown lion from the ground and broken its neck with a quick twist. Some whispered he dwelt in a cave in the mountains like old Polyphemus. “It’s a mortality ludus, so the money is good. When I get it.”

“Uh-uh, sweetheart. Cash up front. We’ve got operating expenses…wives, girlfriends, bookies.” Marsh made a face and drained another glass.

“Okay, Connie,” Singh said with a sharp glance at his partner. “Robert and I didn’t fly all the way out here to break your balls, as the kids say. We’ll see what we can find about TALLHAT. Cash on delivery.” He stood and stretched, then walked to the projector and gathered the film and the photographic plates piled there on a tray.

“Thanks, boys,” Conrad said.

The three remained a while longer, smoking cigarettes and polishing off the scotch. And when his self-appointed watchdogs had gone, Conrad made reservations for a flight to the United States, set the machinery in motion for the next phase, perhaps the final phase of his quest.

Interlude

Dr. Drake, that urbane devourer of children, wasn’t the Devil, but he wanted the title. That, according to the book of Imogene.

In the weeks before Conrad’s father suffered a massive coronary in his cell at Grable and sailed off to join Mom in the Happy Hunting Grounds, he spilled the beans about Drake and their work together to Imogene, and thus deflected her rising star unto madness and death.

Nice going, Pop
. In bitter moments, Conrad always thought Genie should’ve known better about gawking into the abyss and so on. Their father wasn’t a nice man, probably not even a decent one.

Imogene laughed and said Conrad was right on that count. Dad allegedly killed a fellow technician at a laboratory, back in the 1970s—some poor schmuck named Enrique Valdez. Imogene told Conrad all about it late at night when they’d gotten stoned off their asses and drunk a quart of wine. As a kid, she’d eavesdropped on Dad and Mom arguing, pieced together a cryptic phone conversation, and had gotten her sticky mitts on one of Dad’s journals that allegedly made oblique reference to the event. Supposedly there was some kind of top secret bio-weapons program and Valdez tried to steal one of Dad’s formulas, maybe to claim it for his own and get a promotion, maybe to invent something and get rich in the private sector—there was no telling.

All she knew for certain was Dad caught the sneak and killed him. Crushed Valdez’s head with a hotplate; cooked the guy’s face in the process. Conrad didn’t believe it because Dad would’ve gotten locked up for that kind of stunt, and probably forever. Imogene said Dad was too valuable and had too many powerful friends, so the government waved its wand and the killing got swept under the carpet. They filed it as a tragic accident. One could only wonder how many other “tragic accidents” there’d been.

Conrad was even leerier of Dad after that little campfire tale. Then, Dad had his epic breakdown and got hauled away by guys with butterfly nets and they never spoke again.

Imogene was the one who’d visited Dad at that posh Pacific Northwest asylum called Grable, smuggled in whiskey and cigars, patiently endured his episodes of mania and delusion. Frequently, she brought books he’d requested; the musty, esoteric kinds of tomes hoarded in the trunks of Far Eastern antiquarians, many of them poorly typeset or delivered to moldering parchment in the native scripts of their authors (many of these the very same Imogene would inherit one day, then pass along to Conrad). Dad was enamored of ancient astrological theory, most particularly the research of Chinese scholars during the Zhou Dynasty. He spent hundreds of hours meticulously documenting references to astronomical phenomena, with special emphasis on platelet-like bodies and gigantic cellular structures. These he cross indexed with modern accounts of similar unexplained anomalies, a significant portion recorded by NASA shuttle cameras and the International Space Station. Cosmic dust and gas, luminous clouds, sunspots, or evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence—who could say? The universe was a black forest, after all. It added up to something piscine in Dad’s estimation, even if the rest of the experts weren’t overly galvanized about the prospects so obliquely suggested.