This Present Darkness (37 page)

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, I thought it might be on the machine here somewhere.”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s been a while since the files have been updated.”

“Well, could we look anyway?”

Rosemary totally ignored the question. “Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

Bernice stood firm and unshaken. “Well, there was my original question. Have you done any business with anyone named Kaseph in the last year or so?”

“No, I’ve never heard the name.”

“Well, perhaps someone else on your staff—”

“They’ve never heard it either.” Bernice was about to question that, but Rosemary interrupted with, “I would know. I know all their accounts.”

Bernice thought of one other thing. “You wouldn’t have a—a cross-reference file, would you—”

“No, we don’t,” Rosemary answered very abruptly. “Now is there anything else?”

Bernice was tired of being nice. “Well, Rosemary, even if there was, I’m sure you would not be able or willing to supply it. I’m leaving now, so breathe easy.”

She left hurriedly, feeling very lied to.

MARSHALL WAS BEGINNING
to worry about his shock absorbers. This old logging road had more potholes than surface; apparently it wasn’t used that much anymore by the logging companies, but was left to hunters and hikers who knew the area well enough to keep from getting lost. Marshall did not. He looked again at the scribbled directions and then at the odometer. Boy, the miles go by slowly on roads like this one!

Marshall bumped his way around a gravelly corner and finally saw a vehicle ahead, parked alongside the road. Yes, an old Valiant. It was Harmel. Marshall pulled up behind the Valiant and got out. Ted Harmel got out of his car, dressed in clothing for the outdoors: wool shirt, faded jeans, work boots, a wool cap. He looked the way he had sounded: exhausted and very scared.

“Hogan?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Marshall, extending his hand.

Harmel shook it and then turned away abruptly. “C’mon with me.”

Marshall followed Harmel to a trail off the road and they hiked up among the tall timber, picking their way through logs, rocks, and underbrush. Marshall was wearing a suit and his shoes were definitely the wrong kind for this sort of terrain, but he wasn’t about to complain—he’d recaptured the big fish that got away.

At last Harmel seemed satisfied with their seclusion. He went to a
huge fallen log, weathered and bleached by years of changing seasons, and sat down on it. Marshall joined him.

“I want to thank you for calling me,” Marshall said for an opener.

“We never had this meeting,” Harmel said bluntly. “Is that an agreement?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Now what do you know about me?”

“Not much. You used to be the editor of the
Clarion
, Eugene Baylor and the other college regents were on your case, you and Eldon Strachan are friends …” Marshall reviewed quickly all he had learned, which was mostly what he and Bernice had gleaned from the old
Clarion
articles.

Harmel nodded. “Yeah, that’s all true. Eldon and I are still friends. We went through basically the same thing, so that gives us a sort of comradeship. As far as the molesting of Marla Jarred, Adam Jarred’s girl—that was a bizarre set-up. I don’t know who coached her, or how, but somebody got that girl to say all the right words to the police. I do find it significant that the whole matter was settled so quietly. What I was supposed to have done is a felony; you don’t just settle a thing like that quietly.”

“Why did it happen, Ted? What did you do to bring it on yourself?”

“I got too involved. You’re right about Juleen and all the others. It’s a secret society, a club, a whole network of people. Nobody has any secrets from anybody else. The eyes of the group are everywhere; they watch what you do, what you say, what you think, how you feel. They’re working toward what they call a Universal Mind, the concept that sooner or later all the inhabitants of the world will make a giant evolutionary leap and meld into one global brain, one transcending consciousness.” Harmel stopped, looked at Marshall. “I’m spilling it as it comes to me. Is it making sense?”

Marshall had to compare Harmel’s “spillings” with what he already knew. “Every person affiliated with this exclusive network subscribes to these ideas?”

“Yeah. The whole thing is built around occult ideas, Eastern mysticism, cosmic consciousness. That’s why they meditate and do psychic readings and try to meld their minds together …”

“Is this what they do in Langstrat’s therapy sessions?”

“Yes, exactly. Every person who joins the network goes through a certain initiation process. They meet with Juleen and learn to achieve altered states of consciousness, psychic powers, out-of-body experiences. The sessions could involve just one person, or several, but Juleen is at the core of it all, like some kind of guru, and we were all her disciples. We all became like one, growing, interdependent organism, trying to become one with the Universal Mind.”

“You said something about … melding your minds together?”

“ESP, telepathy, whatever. Your thoughts are not your own, and neither is your life. You’re only one segment of the whole. Juleen’s highly skilled in such things. She—she knew my every thought. She owned me …” This part became difficult for Harmel to speak about. He grew tense, and his voice faltered and dropped in volume. “Maybe she still does. Sometimes I still hear her calling to me … moving through my brain.”

“Does she own all the others as well?”

Harmel nodded. “Yeah, everybody owns everybody, and they won’t stop until they own that whole town. I could see it coming. Anybody who gets in their way suddenly drops out of sight. That’s why I’m still wondering about Edie. Ever since this whole thing started happening, I’ve been leery about anyone just dropping out of the picture suddenly …”

“What danger would Edie be to them?”

“Maybe she’s just one more step toward taking you out. I wouldn’t be surprised. They took out Eldon, they took out me, they took out Jefferson …”

“Who’s Jefferson?”

“The district judge. I don’t know how they did it, but suddenly he decided he wouldn’t run for reelection. He sold his home, left town, no one’s heard from him since.”

“And now Baker’s in—”

“He’s part of the network. He’s owned.”

“So did you know this at the time you had your little crime settled so quietly?”

Harmel nodded. “He told me he could make it really rough for me, turn me over to the county prosecutor and then it would be out of his hands. He knew good and well it was a frame-up! He had me checkmated,
so I took him up on it. I got out of town.”

Marshall took out a pad and pen. “Who else do you know that belongs to this bunch?”

Harmel looked away. “If I tell you too much, they’ll trace it back to me. You’ll have to find out for yourself. All I can do is point you in the right direction. Check the mayor’s office and the town council; see who’s new there and who they replaced. They’ve had a lot of turnover lately.” Marshall made a note of it. “You’ve got Brummel?”

“Yeah, Brummel, Young, Baker.”

“Check the county land commissioner, and the president at the Independent Bank, and …” Harmel kept probing his memory. “The county comptroller.”

“I’ve got him on the list.”

“The board of regents at the college?”

“Yeah. Say, wasn’t it the tiff with them that got you run out of town?”

“That was only part of it. I wasn’t controllable anymore. I got in the way. The network took care of me before I could hurt them. But there’s no way I can prove it. It doesn’t matter anyway. The whole thing’s too big; it’s like a huge organism, a cancer that just keeps spreading. You can’t go after just one part of it like the regents and expect to kill the whole thing. It’s everywhere, at every level. Are you religious?”

“In a limited sense, I suppose.”

“Well you’re going to need
something
to fight it. It’s spiritual, Hogan. It doesn’t listen to reason, or to the law, or to any set of morals but its own. They don’t believe in any God—
they
are God.” Harmel paused to calm down and then took off on a different note. “I first got involved with Juleen when I wanted to do a story on some of the so-called research she was doing. I was intrigued by it all—the parapsychology, the strange phenomena she was documenting. I started having these
counseling
sessions with her myself. I let her read and photograph my aura and my energy field. I let her probe my mind and meld our thoughts. I went into it after a novelty story, actually, but I got hooked. I couldn’t tear myself away from it. After a while I started picking up on some of the same things she was heavily involved in: I’d leave my body, go out into space, talk to my instructors—” Harmel caught himself. “Oh man, that’s right: you’re never going to believe any of this stuff!”

Marshall was firm—and maybe he did believe it. “Tell me anyway.”

Harmel gritted his teeth and looked skyward. He fumbled, he stammered, his face went pale. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can tell you. They’ll find out.”

“Who’ll find out?”

“The network.”

“We’re out in the middle of nowhere, Ted!”

“It doesn’t matter …”

“You used the word
instructors.
Who are they?”

Harmel only sat there, trembling, terror etched in his face. “Hogan,” he said finally, “you just can’t cross them. I can’t tell you! They’ll know about it!”

“But who are they? Can you at least tell me that?”

“I don’t even know if they’re real,” Harmel muttered. “They’re just … there, that’s all. Inner teachers, spirit guides, ascended masters … they’re called all kinds of things. But anyone who follows Juleen’s teachings for very long invariably gets mixed up with them. They come from nowhere, they speak to you, sometimes they appear to you when you’re meditating. Sometimes you visualize them yourself, but then they take on a life and personality of their own … it’s not just your imagination anymore.”

“But what are they?”

“Beings … entities. Sometimes they’re just like real people, sometimes you only hear a voice, sometimes you only feel them—like spirits, I suppose. Juleen works for them, or maybe they work for her, I don’t know which way it goes. But you can’t hide from them, you can’t run, you can’t get away with anything. They’re part of the network, and the network knows everything, controls everything. Juleen controlled me. She even came between me and Gail. I lost my wife over this whole thing. I started to do everything Juleen told me … she’d call me in the middle of the night and tell me to come over, and I’d come over. She’d tell me not to print a certain story, I wouldn’t print it. She’d tell me what kind of news to cover and I’d print it, just like she said.

“She owned me, Hogan. She could have told me to take a gun and shoot myself, and maybe I would have done it. You gotta know her to understand what I’m saying.”

Marshall remembered standing in the hallway outside Langstrat’s
class wondering how he got there. “I think I understand.”

“But Eldon found out about the college finances, and we both checked into it, and he was right. The college was headed for the rocks, and I’m sure it still is. Eldon tried to stop it, to get the whole mess straightened out. I tried to help him. Juleen came after me right away and made all kinds of threats. I ended up going in two directions, following two different loyalties. It was like being torn apart inside. Maybe that’s what snapped me out of it; I made up my mind I wasn’t going to be controlled anymore, not by the network, not by anyone. I was a newspaperman; I had to print it the way I saw it.”

“And they took care of you.”

“And it came as a total surprise. Well, maybe not total. When the police came to the paper and arrested me, I almost knew what it was about. It was something I could have predicted from the way Juleen and the others were threatening me. They’ve done that sort of thing before.”

“For instance?”

“I can’t help thinking the real estate offices, the tax rolls, any information you can get on the properties around the town, might show something. I couldn’t follow it up when I was still there, but all the recent real estate deals didn’t feel quite right to me.”

THE REAL ESTATE
business wasn’t feeling quite right to Bernice either. Just as she pulled up in front of Tyler and Sons Realty, she saw the owner, Albert Tyler, locking up the place and getting ready to leave.

She rolled down her car window and asked him, “Say, aren’t you supposed to be open until 5?”

Tyler only smiled and shrugged. “Not on Thursdays.”

Bernice could read the hours on the front door. “But your hours say Monday through Friday, 10 to 5.”

Tyler got just a little cross. “Not on Thursdays, I said!”

Bernice noticed Tyler’s son Calvin driving his Volkswagen out from behind the building. She got out of her car and waved him down. Unwillingly, he paused and rolled down his window.