The Reality Conspiracy (65 page)

Jeff squeezed her hand, smiling weakly.

"Jeff . . . ?"

His eyes fastened on hers.

Karen bit her lower lip. Her gaze dropped to the tabletop, rested there a moment, then rose to look Jeff full in the face. "Mr. Barnes didn't make it."

Jeff appeared to be staring at his untouched sandwich. He remained that way for a long time.

After a while, Karen took a sip of Jeff's coffee'. "They want me back upstairs. More tests. I told them I had to talk to you first. I had to tell you myself. Want to walk up with me?"

"Sure."

They stood up.

"Jeff?"

"Yes?"

"Is it really over? Do you think it's really over?"

They walked toward the door. Jeff opened it for Karen. "I don't know. I honestly don't. I guess all we can do is pray."

"But you did something with the computer, didn't you?"

"I tried."

"What did you do?"

That boyish, slightly mischievous grin tugged at the corners of Jeff's eyes and mouth. "I poisoned it."

The elevator doors slid open. Karen led Jeff inside where they were alone.

"Poisoned it? What do you mean?"

"You've heard of computer viruses?" he asked.

"Yeah. I guess.

"I input a few names of God. You know, Yahweh, Jehovah, Adonai, Elohim, Shaddai, Allah—all the ones I could think of, anyway. I told it to find every possible translation from every known language. Then I instructed the machine to replace its entire memory with those names. To repeat them over and over, continuously, deleting everything else, replacing everything in storage with all the names of God. It was the only thing I could think to do."

He laughed a quick quiet laugh. "It's probably still at work. Deleting words, replacing words. Might take days. Weeks, maybe. That machine's memory is bigger than the Library of Congress."

The elevator doors opened and Karen led Jeff toward her room.

"So what do you think," she asked, "did the names of God kill the demon?"

"No. Not if it really was a demon. Demons don't die, remember? But if we're lucky, those words banished it for a while."

"And if it wasn't a demon? I mean Father Mosely and Father Sullivan both suspected it wasn't a demon. It even said it wasn't a demon. . . ."

Jeff shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe it lied."

"Then it really could be over!"

"Yup, it could. For this time. For now."

Karen and Jeff paused in front of her room.

"Jeff, I have to ask you one more question, okay?"

"Shoot."

"W-was it really true. I mean what Casey said . . . ?"

"You mean the thing about me loving you?"

Karen looked down. Her face grew warm; she knew she was blushing.

Jeff touched her cheek, then took her in his arms. "More than anything else in the world. Even if I were a demon, I couldn't lie about that. In fact," he whispered softly into her ear, "when you've rested up a bit, I'm going to try to talk you into marrying me."

Excerpt from

The Reality Conspiracy:

An Anecdotal Reconstruction of the Events at Hobston, Vermont

Y
ou are reading the next-to-last chapter. The final installment is yet to be written. When it appears, it will detail a history that has not yet come to pass. Already we know it will be inaccurate.

No event can be described with precision until the Reality Conspirators, those orthodox defenders of the paradigm, have learned one simple truth: dexterous as they are with their string, it's not long enough to tie all the loose ends.

Military involvement in the events at Hobston was quick and decisive. Since no one could reach the hilltop, no one witnessed McCurdy's destruction, the preternatural slaughter, or the horror at the Dubois farm. By midmorning the area was cordoned off and secured. Outgoing information was easily controlled.

Newspapers announced the greatest shower of comets in a hundred years. Network television broadcast indistinct videos of a dramatic sky show. All media reports mentioned the tragic deaths of a handful of overeager sightseers who'd stood too close to the meteor's point of impact.

A priest, a janitor, and a farmer's widow were killed in the resulting fire at a nearby farmhouse. Their obituaries ran in the Burlington papers. Two unidentified bodies were found in the rubble: "a grossly deformed individual and a man with a severe head injury." Lucy Washburn and Herbert Gold. Both burned beyond recognition. Father Mosely's remains were never accounted for.

Ironically, tabloids with garish headlines got closer to the truth. As usual, they were discounted.

Any citizen voicing a conflicting claim, accurate or fanciful, was dealt with as a rumormonger, sensationalist, or lunatic. Many endured systematic ridicule or a campaign of disinformation that eclipsed those that disguised the Manhattan Project, Watergate, and the release of Iran's hostages.

The three survivors—in some ways hostages ourselves—were visited by stone-faced officials in severe black suits. On July second they advised us that any disclosure would win harsh and immediate retribution. I could be imprisoned, they reminded, for violating my oath of secrecy. But prison was not an option, they told me with Jack Webb earnestness, because they dispensed justice far swifter than the court system.

I believe them.

I marvel that we are alive, that we did not "vanish" from our hospital rooms.

If I had not run once, I might not have tried it again. This time we did it right. By chance we left Burlington the night Karen's condo exploded. A gas leak. We escaped by less than one hour, and never smelled the fumes.

At the time of our marriage we all changed our names. We are in hiding. Copies of this manuscript are with my publisher, my lawyer, and with a friend at
The New York Times
. None of them knows where to find us.

Casey still does not walk. She can, but she refuses, fearing the return of dangerous visitors.

Karen doesn't freeze anymore. She had spent a lifetime apologizing for an embarrassing personal imperfection that, quite possibly, saved the world.

I ponder the inevitable. To me it seems that all of it was planned, choreographed, plotted long ago in that unwritten text that will become history. New irony has entered our lives.

Now, months later, we watch shadows with heightened alertness. Darkness takes on new meaning. Whispers unnerve us. A bird glimpsed in our peripheral vision has the potential to terrify. A flower grows; a mountain moves.

Each of us—Karen, Casey, and myself—sees the world in an unfamiliar way. And what we see is incomplete.

We have new knowledge: We, everyone, holds dual citizenship in two separate realities. One, the known, is the construct of rational thinkers, those degree-waving ortho-docs who pound their gavel of conviction and scream with judicial authority

that frogs don't rain from the skies,

and men don't fly without wires,

red-eyed man-beasts don't shamble in the forest,

people don't spontaneously combust,

statues don't cry,

children never issue from virgin wombs,

and no one ever walks off the face of the earth forever.

Yet, like it or not, from the moment of our birth, and always thereafter, regardless of our level of personal enlightenment, we cannot avoid participation in a conspiracy to deny what we cannot, or will not understand.

And with each new heartbeat the string that ties all truth together tightens like a noose.

—Jeffrey Chandler, 1993

THE END

I
t is unlikely this book will ever become a motion picture. Every time it has been optioned, the deal has fallen through. If there is no movie, there can be no DVD. And without a DVD there can be no "Extras."

So to compensate—and to celebrate the e-book release—I thought it might be fun to provide a COMMENTARY and some DELETED SCENES.

So here's goes…

DEUS-X
: A Cursed Book?

A
lot has happened since 1990 when Warner Books purchased the manuscript of
DEUS-X
. The U.S. has been involved in nonstop warfare; the towers fell; the Bush-Cheney trauma came and went; an economy-crushing recession hit; and we're now living on a much warmer globe.

In a more benign realm, such things as cell phones have become ubiquitous. So have pocket computers, streaming video, and e-books. Information is everywhere.

Related and reactionary, I believe, is the proliferation of interest in the supernatural — TV, games, books, movies — with ghost-hunting groups appearing like hydra's heads. And let's not forget the end of the world cults. And right-wing religious extremism. And on and on and on . . .

The world has changed. Just as
DEUS-X
predicted.

T
he novel itself has a unique biography, complete with a hideous birth and a misanthropic life. It is clearly my darkest book, its menace not just physical but also philosophical. It deals in things worse than death. Writing it, and surviving its publication, has left me more than a little unsettled.

The core idea evolved from my lifelong interest in anomalous phenomena, colored, of course, by a personal paranoia about big government and a distrust of commercial religion. Beginning when I was a child, then propelled by an early dose of Roman Catholicism, I have long-pondered the nature of supernature. I'm convinced things strange and mystifying actually occur, from fish falls to religious apparitions to spontaneous human combustion. Such outbreaks of high strangeness seem random, totally unrelated, and—surprisingly—not all that rare.

Crackpots and courageous scientists study UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, aquatic monsters, and myriad other mysteries, things just a bit outside the spotlight of conventional science. Yet these renegade researchers often demonstrate a certain territorialism. Those investigating UFOs ignore (or perhaps scoff at) the Bigfoot hunters. Bigfoot hunters question the credibility of people who witness ghosts. And ghost hunters might mock anyone who claims to have seen the Lake Champlain Monster. Four phenomena, four separate sets of investigators. Everyone looking in different directions.

That got me wondering, What if the various supernatural occurrences were
not
different? What if they—Bigfoot, Champ, ghosts, UFOs, and others—all flowed from the same spring? What if they are elaborate distractions designed to keep our attention away from the true source?

And if so, what might that source look like?

I think it would be something highly unconventional and truly terrifying. Quite possibly something never yet imagined.

I
tried to imagine it.

I searched for it where I suspect it might be hiding: amid my most profound personal fears, terrors, and paranoias. Perhaps I probed deeper into my psyche than I had intended because weird things started to happen.

Is it possible that such probing can work the way magic works? By opening long-locked psychic doors, can something terrible be loosed?

Or can such introspection attract something? Call to ourselves the attention of an alien consciousness that might otherwise have paid us little heed?

Either way, by thinking about and writing
DEUS-X,
I fear I inadvertently performed a sort of ritual, one that culminated in a bit of black magic. Maybe I wrenched into the light something that fought not to be exposed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I
t all started innocently enough. I had already published four marginally successful horror novels, now I felt it was time to spread my wings. I commenced work on
DEUS-X
, originally titled
The Reality Conspiracy
. But during the period I was writing it—roughly from 1988 to 1991—my life situation grew darker and darker. I had to abandon, then jumpstart the manuscript at least three times. I also missed a number of deadlines, something I had never done before.